BEST Tips and Tricks for REALISTIC Lighting in Lumion

What's happening ladies and gentlemen, this is Minh from Architecture Inspirations. Today I'm going to show you some tips for realistic lighting in Lumia. Let's get started. First, let's create a daytime exterior render. I'll use this camera view, but you can use another view if you like. The first effect I'll add is 2-point perspective, which will make the scene's vertical lines go straight up and down. This will improve the composition and make it look better. Now let's talk about lighting the scene. First, let's add a Sun effect. This is a typical effect that you can use for any scenes. Here we can adjust the different settings such as the Sun Height and the Sun Heading, as well as the Brightness. Instead of using the Sun effect, we can also use the Real Skies effect, which is an effect that uses HDRIs or High Dynamic Range images to light up your scene. You can see that a new background has been added. Now you can make adjustments using these settings. First is the Heading which determines the rotation of the HDRI. Then there's the Brightness and Overall Brightness which control the brightness of the render and the background image. I can also change the HDRI by clicking here. Lumion has many HDRIs that you can use which are organized in different categories including Cloudy, Evening, Morning, Overcast, Sunset, Clear, and Night. I will choose this one, and I will adjust the Heading like so. However, you can see that we cannot change the Sun Height here in the Real Skies effect, so what I can do is go back here and click here to move the Sun effect above the Real Skies effect. Now I can have more control over the sun's position, but I can still keep the HDRI from the Real Skies effect for the background of the scene. Pretty cool huh? Next, I'm going to add a Skylight effect. Then I'll enable Skylight in Planar and Projected Reflections. These two sliders here are also important. If you increase the brightness, you can see more clearly how the light from the sky is dispersed onto your scene. Decreasing this slider will soften the effect. If you increase the Saturation slider, you will see that the effect is even more saturated. I'll just leave the Saturation at 1, and the Brightness a bit lower like so. As you can see, the Skylight effect helps disperse light from the sky onto your scene so the lighting is more realistic. But as you can see the render is a bit too dark now, so I will add an Exposure effect and increase the Exposure a bit to brighten up the scene. That looks good. Next, let's add the Hyperlight effect which helps simulate radiosity and increase the light bounces in the scene. I will also leave this at the default settings. Here you can see that the shadows on the buildings are now more realistic. Now let's add the Shadow effect. Here you will see many different settings that you can experiment with. For this scene, I will focus on these two settings down here. With Soft Shadows on, you can see that the shadows are a bit blurred out like so, which can make it more realistic. And if you turn on the Fine Detail Shadows, Lumion will add more details to your shadows. This can make a huge difference in your render. Here you can see that the Fine Detail Shadows have added more details on the trees and on the buildings. There we go, with some quick and simple effects in Lumion, you can see a huge difference in the render. Remember that you can always go back and make changes to your effect. For example, I can change the Real Skies effect to a sunset one like so. When changing the Real Skies effect, I might need to make some changes to the Sun effect to make the lighting fit the background. I will also go into the Skylight effect and increase the brightness to max. And finally, I will add the Color Correction effect to make some final adjustments such as changing the temperature so that it's a bit warmer to make it feel more like a sunset scene. And that's how you can set up daytime lighting for exterior, now let's go to an interior scene. For a daytime interior render, I approach it with the same workflow. I'll start with the Sun effect and adjust the Height, Heading, and Brightness to make it best fit the scene. As for the Skylight, I'll keep the Brightness at 1, but I'll decrease the Saturation a bit like so. Next, I'll use the Exposure and set it to about 0.7. Again, for the Hyper Light, I'll leave it at the default settings. For the Shadow settings, I'll turn on the Fine Detail and Soft Shadows. But I'll also decrease the Brightness quite a bit to create more contrast between the dark and light parts of the scene. Next, I'll add a new effect that we haven't used, which is the Reflection effect. First, I'll turn on Speedway Reflections, then I'll click here and add Reflection Planes. Reflection Planes simulate accurate mirror-like reflections no matter where the camera viewpoint is. The drawback with adding Reflection Planes is the increase in computer processing and render time. The more planes assigned, the more power is needed. As you can see, with the Reflection effect, our reflections in the scene look way more realistic. Again, I'll use the Color Correction effect to make some final adjustments. Another important tip for interior scenes like this one is to make sure you change the quality of the Scala effect to Ultra because it can make a huge difference. When it comes to night time, whether it be interior or exterior, the effects are still important. But what's more important is how you light up your scene using Lumion lights. Here are a few tips of how to set up lighting for your night time scenes. In Lumion, there are different types of light objects which are suitable for different real world lighting fixtures. For example, Spotlights are good for Reset Scan Lights, and for cone-shaped lamps like this one. Area Lights are great when used as Fill Lights to increase the brightness of a room. Line Lights are similar to Area Lights but they're skinnier, which makes them perfect for creating cove lighting for ceilings or under cabinet lighting. Last but not least, Omni Lights are great for lamps or even fireplaces. You'll probably need to place multiple lights in your scene, so here are some tips for placing lights efficiently. After you place a light, you can hold Alt and move it to make copies, and you can make as many as you need using this method. If you want to replace a light, select it and click here to show advanced options, then click here to replace it. Then the library will open up and you can choose which light you want to replace with. If you want to replace multiple lights, then you can hold Ctrl and drag to select multiple lights. Alternatively, you can select one light and click this button to select all of the same types, and then you can replace them. Next, it's important to understand light properties. After placing a light, you can further adjust the light settings in the properties panel such as the brightness and the color. For the color of the light, you can use the color wheel and these sliders or type in specific values here. You can also hover over the color of the light and press Ctrl C to copy it, then go to another light and press Ctrl V to paste the color. Alternatively, you can hold Ctrl and drag to select multiple lights, then change them all at once like so. For the spotlights, you can adjust the cone angle here. Or you can load in a custom IES file to simulate an accurate real world lighting profile. For area lights, you can adjust the width and length with these sliders. And you can do the same with line lights. You can also adjust the falloff of the light here. If you enable Show Light Source, then they can also simulate rectangle shaped lights like so. For Omni lights, you can also adjust the falloff here. In addition, you can use this slider to change the Exclusion Zone so that you can exclude the shadows if the light needs to be within an object similar to this situation here. You can see that we can easily remove the shadows of the lamp itself. Also, I recommend changing the Shadows Quality to High for more details. Another tip for setting up these types of light fixtures is that you can add a Fill Light to eliminate the lamp shakes. And again, you can adjust the brightness and color over here. Besides using the lights, you can also use emissive materials to enhance your scene. First, select the material for the lightbulb. Note that this only works with imported objects, but materials of a Lumion object cannot be customized. After you have selected the material, click here to expand the advanced settings and go to this tab, then use the slider to make the material emissive. There we go, now the lightbulb looks amazing. Nighttime exterior are similar to interior, but sometimes you can use the lights a bit differently. For example, here we can use spotlights for sharp shadows in combination with area lights for softer shadows to create uplights for this building. Pretty cool huh? When doing exterior nighttime renders, you can turn on car lights by adjusting this slider here. You can also select multiple cars and change them all at once. It looks good, but you can see that there are no lights emitting from the car headlights. So we can go back and add some spotlights to the front of the car. Then for each light, you can use this button to target the light direction. It's starting to look better, but you can see that the lights don't move with the car. So what we need to do is select the lights and the car and add it to a group. Now the lights will move with the car. Note that you can always go back and change the settings of the lights if you need. And just repeat these steps for other cars in your scene. And there we go, just use these tips to add lights to your scene, and with some practice, your scene can look amazing. Remember to be creative when using Lumion lights, and don't be afraid to experiment with Lumion effects such as Fog, God Rays, Lens Flare, and many more. However, don't go too overboard with the effects, sometimes less is more. And those are some tips for realistic lighting in Lumion. That's all for today guys, leave a like if you enjoyed the video, and comment below if you have any questions. Stay inspired guys, and I'll see you, next time.