Is Lumion 7 surpassing UE4 for Arch Vis?

[darthviper107]

@archit3k;744917

I work in a firm that luckily has its own graphic division. Which is the portion i work under.

Some of the issues we have encountered and the decisions what most firms i know have gone to Lumion is time and money. Its becoming extreme difficult to find students or interns who know 3D rendering as good as they did say 3 years ago. Out of all the portfolios we see per day, id say 5% know sufficient Vray, Photoshop, indesign, etc… Alot of this loss in graphic representation can be faulted to Revit, and most schools teaching it as a design software.

One of my friends who works at the big “G” firm, said they where discussing switching to lumion because it easier to use, provides enough “realism”, and some VR capabilities right out of the box without any need for special trainining. Mostly because alot of firms wont hire say a specialist in UE4 for graphics and renderings, they will usually pick the best in house that can do it.

Also you usually dont have around 4 weeks, 4 months, to do a rendering for client. Often well in my particular firm, our deadlines are about 3-8 days complete renders. 1 week if we have multiple views, and about 1.5 weeks for After Effects animations.

I agree UE4 has amazing graphics, but it steep learning curve ultimately will be it downfall in architecture. Unless they smooth out a process and increase pipeline workflow.

That is something that Epic is looking to improve–one thing is getting your scenes to UE4 quickly so they are working on a plugin for 3ds Max that can send over a full scene and convert your materials. You can sign up for the beta here: http://unrealengine.com/beta

The other biggest challenge is the lighting, making lightmap UV’s is a big hassle for archviz and you still have to build the lighting so you likely have to get it to render overnight though when it’s done you can do animations very quick and that’s a better option than waiting days for a single shot to render with Vray.
You may want to look into Nvidia VXGI which is a fully dynamic GI system, it’s not going to give as good of results as baked lighting, but it’s very quick and can give acceptable results for some cases. It requires building the source code to do that however: NVIDIA GameWorks Integration - Asset Creation - Epic Developer Community Forums