5 Levels of Exterior Rendering in Lumion

What's happening ladies and gentlemen, this is Minh from Architecture Inspirations. Today I'm going to show you the 5 Levels of Architecture Animations in Lumion. Let's get started. 1. For this level, users will go straight to the movie mode and click here to create an animation. Here is where I can set the camera view, then I can click this button to set the first keyframe. Next, move the camera to another position, and click the button again to set the second keyframe. Just repeat this process to add more keyframes for the clip. You can also use this small arrow to insert a new keyframe between the clips. If you want to edit a keyframe, you can just move the camera to a new position, then click this button to update it. This button here will let you preview the movie clip. If you want to delete a keyframe, then click this button here. I usually use only 2 keyframes per clip because it often leads to better results. Here I will create a simple forward movement with the camera. You can also adjust the length of the clip here. There we go, if you're happy with it, then you can export the animation here. But I will first add some styles and effects. For me, I can go to one of the folders I already made, and copy the settings, then paste it in my animation. If you don't know how to use different styles to create realistic renders in Lumion, then I suggest you watch these two videos here. When you're happy with how it looks, click here to render the clip, or here to render the whole movie. For the output quality, I will set it to 3 or 4 stars, and I'll keep the frames per second at 30, and use 1920x1080 for resolution. As you can see, even at level 1, Lumion makes it really easy for you to create an animation. Level 2 At level 2, users can improve their animation by adding some simple animated effects. For example, I can add the wind effect. And here you can control the wind speed, direction, and how much it affects the foliage. That looks great. To make this look even better, I can adjust the sky and clouds effect to add some clouds movement. Here I will increase the clouds speed to animate the clouds. I can also use the slider to change the clouds direction. I will make it go in the same direction as the wind. There we go, that looks good. Besides the animated effects, there are also animated objects that you can add to your scene to breathe life into your design, such as animated people and animals like birds and fish. I'm just kidding, this is a swimming pool, but you know what I mean. When adding people and animals, I can use the Time Warp effect to change people animation position. For example, I can control whether they are facing the camera or away from the camera like so. Finally, I usually create a new separate layer to put in the people and animals object so I can easily control when I want to see them in my animation. Besides people and animals, you can also add animated effect objects which include fountains, fire, smoke, fog, leaves, etc. For this scene, I will add some falling leaves. In the properties window, you can adjust its settings such as the color of the leaves and the wind direction in the X and Z axis. If you want to see it easier, you can look at it from the top down. Then you can adjust the amount as well as the size and type of the leaves. As you can see, the falling leaves work great with the wind effect that we added earlier. But as we know, leaves usually fall during the autumn when they turn brown and orange. So I will add the auto effect and turn the leaves of my trees a bit orange. For the materials in my model such as the grass, I need to go back to the build mode and change them. And similar to the people and animals, I will put the leaves in a different layer, this will be useful later. Level 3 At level 3, users will learn how to animate effects using keyframes. For example, we can animate the sun and clouds to create a time-lapse effect. Before I do that, I will make a duplicate of my animation by clicking these three dots, and copy this clip, then paste it in the next slot. Now for the time-lapse effect, we will use the sun effect to simulate the passing of time. First, let's add a keyframe for both the sun height and heading at the start of the clip and also at the end of the clip. Then for each keyframe, we can use these sliders to set the sun's position. That looks good. But having people and the leaves falling in real time doesn't really fit well with the time-lapse effect so I will turn both of these layers off. Instead of using the sun effect, we can also use the sun study effect, which allows you to set the geographic position of your project as well as the date and time. Like before, we can use the same workflow to animate the sun path, in this case, we only need to animate our slider. To make this look even better, I can adjust the sky and clouds effect to add some clouds movement. There we go, that looks good. Before I go on, I will make another copy of this clip. Now let's go back to the sun study effect and go to the second keyframe and change the hour to even later in the evening. So now we have a day to night animation, pretty cool huh? For the next part, let's add a layer effect to our clip. Then I can create one keyframe here and another one when it's almost night time. Then I can turn on the layers for interior and exterior lights. Now I have an animation where the lights turn on at night. That looks good, but there's a better way to do that. First, let's go back to the build mode then turn on the lights layer. Now I will go to the lights category, and then I can hold Ctrl and drag the left mouse button to select all of the lights. On the property window, we can turn the night activation mode to on. Now let's go back to the movie mode and turn off the layer because we don't need it anymore. As you can see, now the lights automatically turn on at night. You can also set the night activation mode to random so the lights turn on in a random order. Pretty cool huh? Next, let's copy this clip and add some rain to our scene. To do that, let's add a precipitation effect to the scene. Here you can switch between rain and snow with the slider. Then let's go to the beginning of the clip and add a keyframe for the precipitation phase and particle size. Then set both to 0. Now move to the next point on the clip and add another keyframe for both settings. Then we can increase these so that it looks like it just started to rain in the scene. For a better look, I will change the real sky's background to one of the overcast skies. Just make sure the sun effect is turned off or is below the real sky's effect and you're good to go. This also works for the snow effect too. But the snow on the ground takes a while to build up so I will make the small tweaks to the settings to create this animation. For this new clip, I will add the Depth of Field effect, which is a good effect to control the focus of the camera. First, let's use these sliders to make the camera focus on this part of the foreground by adjusting the amount and focus distance. This will be the first keyframe. Now let's move to the next point on the clip and add another keyframe. Then adjust the focus distance to make it focus on the house. We can animate the other settings too, but I will only use the focus distance because that's all we need. Now let's talk about animating effects in Lumia. I will first add a car to our scene, then we can add a move effect to our clip. Next, click on the pencil icon to start editing. Here we can set the starting position of the car, then click this next arrow and move the object to the ending position. Now we can click here to preview the animation. There we go, that's super easy. However, this will take a really long time if you have lots of objects in the scene. Here you can see that I have applied the move effect to the people in the scene. But as for the cars, we can animate multiple at once using the Mask Move effect. Then we can click on the pencil icon to edit. Next, let's fly up high and create a path that follows his road. Here we can adjust the width of the path and click here to preview the animation. The cars are moving a bit slow so let's increase the speed here. Now we need to do it for the other direction as well. But instead of adding another path, we can reposition this path so that it's in the center then increase the width so that it fits all of the lanes. Then I can click here to make this path two directional. There we go, that works. You can also use the move effect to animate doors like this. However, you can see that this sliding door is attached to the whole building. So I need to go to my Sketchup model and export the door as a separate component. Then while using the LiveSync plugin, I will hide this door, which we also hide it in Lumion. Now I can import the door model and move it to the correct position. You can see that importing the door might make it lose its material so we just need to copy and paste the material from this door to our new one like so. Now let's add the move effect and make this door move in this direction like so. There we go, that's how you can create an animated door. When you have learned all the basics, you can get to level 5 where you will use all of these effects in combination with each other to create animations such as this summer to autumn to winter animation. First, I will add the autumn effect and change the leaves color to orange. This will be at the 4 second mark. While at the beginning of the clip, it will be summer so the leaves will be green. And at 8 seconds, it will be winter so the leaves will be a bit less saturated. Or if you like, you can even replace these trees with winter trees using the layer effect. Next, I will add the precipitation effect. For this effect, I will skip to 8 seconds and animate the snow like so. As for the grass and hedges, I will change them back to a green color for the summer. But if you remember, the autumn effect doesn't affect them because they are materials of imported objects. To animate this, we need to select the imported model. And click here to create a variation for autumn. You can see a new variation of the model is created. Now we can change the color of the grass and of these hedges here. Then I will repeat this process for winter. For winter, I'll make the grass a bit shorter and less saturated. Next, let's add the variation control effect. Then click on Edit. And now we need to choose our building model. As we slide through the slider, you can see the model switching between the variations 1, 2, and 3. Now we just need to animate this effect so that it switches at the right time. Finally, I will use the layer effect and animate it so that the leaves will only fall in the autumn. And I will also turn off the layer for the people and animals. And those are the 5 levels of architecture animations in Lumion. After all, animation is about telling a story. So if you want, you can use post-production softwares like Adobe Premiere to make simple edits and add side effects in your animation to really show viewers how it feels to be in that space whether it be a bustling street or a calm interior space. And 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.