Hey Ronen, youāre quite right about the closed garden, and Iād say it is also a dead end because you canāt export the model once itās inside Lumion.
As part of my role I have to constantly test new technology to be implemented inside my office so Iāve used Unity, CryEngine, UE4 and Lumion. Iām pretty vocal regarding the pros and cos of each software and I agree Lumion has been improving a lot, theyāve been adding more realism to their engineā¦to the point that itās almost a full circle with offline renderers. For instance, when you apply all of the filters, effects, resolution (1920x1080) and anti-alias the time per frame drops dramatically. Iāve had frames as long as 1 minute and 30 seconds, which is quite funny because my Vray settings for animations vary from 45-120 seconds. Letās be realistic, yeah Lumion nowadays looks ok but it wonāt look better than Vra/Corona, so whatās the point of using it? The skill level, you see, visualisers require technical and artistic skills, and not everyone can create imagery as we do, so itās very common for architects to try to visualise it themselves but everytime that had happened Iād had to re-render from scratch using either Vray/Corona or UE4.
And when I suggest āhey why donāt you learn UE4? I can teach youā the reply is always the same āUE4 itās too hardā That infuriates me so much because my company is paying thousands and thousands of dollars just because people refuse to learn something new? Let me remind you guys that UE4 is completely free for our industry since all we produce are images and videos.
There are tons of free resources to get you started and if you really require it thereās Datasmith which allows you to have live link and other useful features.