How to make Ultra REALISTIC renders in Lumion

What's happening ladies and gentlemen, this is Minh for Architecture Inspirations. Today I'm going to show you how to add details to your renders to make your render ultra realistic. Let's get started. Most of the time, the 3D assets look too perfect. That's why adding details and imperfections to your models and materials is a great way of making your renders more realistic. In Lumion 12, you can use decals to add details to your scene such as road markings, artwork, damage, stains, etc. But in version 12.3, you can now create your own custom decals. To use it, first open up the decals library and click here to load a custom decal, which by default has Lumion's logo. After you place the decal on the surface, you can click on the Select tool and in the Properties window, click here to show more options. Here you will see a panel where you can upload different maps to create your custom decal. Let's talk about the different ways of using decals to add details to your scene. The first way is Artistic, an example of which would be adding a mirror to a wall. For this example, we just need to load in our custom photo in the Color Map slot. And there we go, now we can move and rotate the decal however we want. If you want to change the size of the decal, then we can use the Scale tool. These sliders here will let you blend the colors, normals, glossiness, and reflectivity of the decal with the underlying surface. For example, you can reduce the color slider so the colors of the mirror aren't too vibrant and blend in with the wall a bit more. Or you can leave it at the maximum value to make it more bright and colorful. As for these normal, glossiness, and reflectivity maps, they are blank by default, but they will be more useful later when we import our own maps. For instance, I want the mirror to inherit the glossiness and reflectivity of the wall so I'll reduce the sliders to 0. Similar to the mirror on the interior wall, you can also use decals to create mirrors or graffiti on exterior walls. Note that when loading in decals like this, if you want certain areas to be transparent, then make sure the image is a PNG. If it's not a PNG, then you can use tools such as Photoshop to remove the background of the image and then save it as a PNG so when you reload it in back to Lumion, it will show the transparent parts correctly. There are also other uses such as chalk art on a sidewalk like so. Here you can see that the decal is overlapping the staircase, so I can use a range slider to reduce it so that it only overlaps the ground. But in other cases, you might want to increase the range slider. The next type of use for decals is functional uses such as logos and road markings, etc. You can see that by default, the custom decal is the Lumion logo, but you can easily load in your own logo like so. This is great for putting your logo on surfaces such as walls, floors, and objects. Another functional way that you can use a decal is for road markings. In Lumion's decal library, there are plenty of road markings decals that you can use, but you can always add your own. For custom decals, there are a couple of websites where you can download decals for free, I will leave the links in the description box below. For this example, I'll use the painted lines from Megascans. After you have downloaded the decal, it will come in as a zip file, so you need to extract it. Here you will see all of the maps that will come with the decal. We will first load in the albedo map or the color map. You can see that we need to remove the background. With these materials, you can do that using the opacity map. To use it, first bring in the opacity map, then I will use the marquee tool and select the whole image, then use Ctrl C to copy. Next, I will hide the opacity map, then I'll click here to add a layer mask to the albedo layer. After that, I will hold Alt and left click the layer mask to isolate it. Then use Ctrl V to paste the opacity map. There we go, now we can save it as a PNG, then reload it, and that looks good. Another tip is to hold Alt and drag the decal to easily duplicate it like so. Pretty cool huh? These sites also have decals such as Damage and Cracks, which are the next type of decal called Surface Imperfections. Similar to before, I will use the opacity map to remove the unnecessary parts of this albedo map. When you download decals from these sites, sometimes they include maps such as normal and roughness maps. The normal map is great for adding depth to the decal. However, Liminal doesn't use the roughness maps, but since roughness and glossiness maps are inverts of each other, you can just open up the roughness map in Photoshop and then invert it, and now you have a glossiness map ready to use. Just save it and load it in the glossiness slot. Now the decal will have a more realistic glossiness. As you can see, knowing how to use the normal and glossiness maps can make the decal super realistic. In other cases, such as this asphalt patch here, using the normal map is enough. That's because I want the decal to inherit the glossiness and reflectivity of the ground below. You can also use this method to add surface imperfections on interior surfaces such as stains on a countertop or scratches on a wood floor. For example, here I got a liquid stain texture that I want to use on this countertop. First I will make this texture have a transparent background using the method I've shown in the previous example. Then I'll load in the PNG image. Here I can adjust the blend of the color map, and I can also override it with a color if I like. But if you notice, even when I reduce the color blend to 0, you will still see the stains decal affecting the glossiness of the countertop. This is a really awesome way of creating surface imperfections that can only be seen at certain angles in certain lighting conditions. Pretty cool huh? Another instance of when you want to reduce the color map intensity is when you're adding scratches to a surface. Here I can make the scratches any color I want, but that looks okay. But it will look even better if I import the normal map. And then reduce the color map intensity completely. As you can see, the wood floor looks like it has real scratches on it. Instead of using decals from websites, you can also create your own using Photoshop. Here I'm using the shape tool to draw some lines to create a geometric pattern. Then I'll fill those white spots with some solid colors. And now we can import this and make some more adjustments to blend it with the wall. And there we go, now we have a cool design for my wall which I created myself. You can also use decals to easily create design options for your projects. First I will need to place a decal in a separate layer. I'll rename this to Design 1. Then I'll hide this decal and then add another design. Then place it in another layer which I will call Design 2. Just repeat this process for as many design options as you need. Next, in the photo mode, we will need to add a layer visibility effect. Then I will use this to turn off design 2 and 3 so I can only see design 1. Next I will copy this photo and paste it here. And I'll use the layer effect again to only show design 2. And finally repeat this process for design 3. There we go, now we have 3 photos for 3 design options ready to render. And you can also apply this method for a video. Just copy this photo and paste it in the movie mode and it will transfer all the effects. Now I can edit the movie clip and add another frame to the clip as well as increasing the length a little. To animate the layer effect, I will add a keyframe at the beginning of the clip. Then move the timeline by 2 seconds and add another keyframe. This is where design 2 is visible. Then move another 2 seconds and add another keyframe where design 3 is visible. And now we have a clip showing all the design options. You can also move the second camera frame forward a little so that the animation is more dynamic. Sometimes you don't have to find a specific decal to make it work, for example, the decal library has lots of decals that you can use. Just try adjusting the blend sliders and overriding the color map with a solid color to achieve a subtle effect. Sometimes less is more. If you have imported a decal that you really like and want to save it for later, here's how to do it. Currently the only way to save a decal is by turning it into a group and you have to select two or more objects to group it. For example, I can duplicate this decal and then group them like so. After that, I can edit the group and delete one of the decals. Note that the group's origin is here so I will move the origin of the decal closer to it. Then I can click here to finish. Now I can click here to save it. And here I can create a new folder for the decals. And up here, I can give it a name. Just repeat this process for any decals that you want to save. And when I want to import them to another model, I can go to groups and open the decals folder and then place the decal in the scene. And now I can choose to leave it as a group or I can edit it or even ungroup it to see all of the settings for the decal. There we go, that saves me a lot of time from importing the maps each time I want to use the same decal. Besides using decals, another way to make your model more realistic is by applying the weathering effect to your materials. Note that you don't have to overdo it, subtlety is key when adding weathering to materials. As you can see, with some quick adjustments, our scenes look even more realistic. Another cool feature is Custom License Plates. Even though Lumion already has a library of license plates that you can use, you can upload your own license plate using the Custom License Plate object. To create my own design, I can do that in Photoshop and then load it in here. If it looks odd, then I can adjust the dimensions here. There are also fonts for license plate that you can download online to create a more realistic license plate. It can be anything you want, and you can even add a background to it. Or you can just keep it simple. And those are the tips to increase ultra realism in your renders. There are also other new features in Lumion 12.3 that you should try such as Volumetric Omni Light. Anyway, that's all for today guys. Leave a like if you enjoyed the video. Comment below if you have any questions. Stay inspired guys, and I'll see you, next time.