Using After Effects for animations really makes a difference but this is not what Lumion is about I think.
You could spent easily spent 50% of your 3D budget again for post editing your footage with greenscreen stuff and such.
An example:
Just imagine using a green screen (green flat surface placeholder) in Lumion for an advertising billboard. In After Effects you can replace this easily with an animated billboard recorded somehwere else. In you final movie you will have an animated billboard then. Its no rocket science.

You can do some nice post straight in Lumion with the on-board effects. This will be good to go for 90% of architects or clients. If you need the extra portion of visuals and eye-candy then go for post editing and spice up your animation like it the movies you posted.

ah cool. thanks. looks good! all the geometry and textures of the video scene were so distracting to see the effect. if you would have released only the shot people would have asked for the complex scene.  
of course i dont compare vray with realtime graphics. i would compare with other game engines.

EDIT: The floor should be brighter I guess. The transition from bright spot is to harsh I think.

I can't help myself but this does not look like global illumination. There is color bleeding yes, but all other stuff just looks like a higher ambient light to me.

Can we see just on light or illuminated box in one room so we see the scattering? Will normal and specular maps also affected by indoor lights?

I can't decide yet if its a good GI solution or not. I will update anyway I guess hehe...

dont mess up a windows app with a windows program.

as far as i know you can still install all kind of tools and programs with windows 8.

If you would implement SLI support for rendering you guys could work on polishing lumion 3.0 for us plus rendering cool previews in the background. 

The LumenRT image is oversaturated in my opinion.
Only unbiased rendering is the true rendering.

EDIT: What I do often is to set up a rought scene with Maxwell or Octane render out the light quickly and then try to match this result in real-time.

I posted here ages ago: http://lumion3d.com/forum/development-inside-info/realistic-look-instead-of-%27game%27-look/ (scroll down to the pile of wooden planks)

As far as I know Otoy wants to bring streamed cloud-gaming to the masses. So you play on your ipad for example a AAA game using otoy GPU clusters in the background.

They mix it up with other effects and hired the guy behind iEnhancer who seems to do a great job enhancing GTA IV graphics with his skills.

I have to admit that Octane really picked up speed after the aquisition. More plugins and faster development.

If you throw in GPU rendering then you may enjoy this:

Real-time photorealistic rendering on the GPU: physics test in street scene 2	Small | Large

Dont miss to follow RayTraceys Blog about Brigade:

http://raytracey.blogspot.be/


Its very promising and I think two or three GPUs are not that expesnive theese days but perform well. plu they started to combine the unbiased rendering with post-effects which make it look pretty.

My choose is Adobe Affter Effects.

Sony Vegas seems to be used widely too. Or if you like it free then the Blender Compositing Tools.

A lot of my clients apprecite as realistic deliveries of mine as possible butthey are also aware of the fact that realism costs.
With Lumion and Real-Time at all I offered them a good balance of both since 2009 now (lumion a bit later of course).

I don't expect another VRay. I already have unbiased renderer here to get photorealistic projects done. But what I would like to see Lumion head to, at least quality wise, is to other game-engines like what we see in Cryengine3, UE3 or Battlefield3. Mostly theese engines archieve the looks with their ability to color-grade, have lens-effect and a good material system. All those are mostly shader effects and it should be possible without pointing out the license for such engines or whatever comes on the table if AAA game-engines are mentioned.

With the features announced now I think I can risk a payment. Althought I need to find a client who needs a football field in the snowy alpines with sporty african guys near a new ocean.

What appraoch do we use here generating GI?

It sounds a bit like a brighter fill light (ambient light) with some color bleeding only. No real GI.
I guess only videos will show. For example with a dark room and just one light in coming through a window or so.


For animations:
I think its useful for everyone. 3D pro or architect user. If you really want to go beyong a good arch-viz presentation and generate an emotional connection for your presentation and possible investors/buyers of your home you simply need some custom animation import.

I see it at the moment during the Bekerman museum contest. I can't even tell some kind of story with custom people walking around or looking at certain things. I wonder if most architects only need some fly round an object stuff and 3d people doing generic tasks. Not very breath taking hehe.

Hey guys,
I already mailed Act3d but got no anwser...

My tax guy needs the VAT / Tax Number from Act-3D and I'm not able to find it anywhere on the page.

I hope you guys have one.

Really love the new trees.

What a good improvement would be is the asset browser in lumion. there are so many trees and models now that its easy to lost the overview. especially the small thumbs for vegetation which is basically a 5-10m tree squeezed on 80px.
I end up placing lots of trees to see how they actually look and this costs time.

I like the analogy with the model-viewer. But this applies for most tools where you use models. But this is the business game with software. lets take Adobe for example. You pay same price in EUR as in USD. Or get 80% discount if you work on a institution. Licensing costs are very hard to estimate. All in all its question of personal value. I guess I will update this year too because next year it would be even more expensive like it is mostly if you skip one version. On the other hand I don't have much paying projects at the moment using Lumion.

I was a fan of the plugin system they did. If you need something just buy it. But maybe it didn't pay off for Act-3D. If most people dont buy the heavy price then they will rethink. Its that simple.
It is even not a smart move if they would release GI and reflections now with Lum3 because most innovation for next years won't be away and sales could go down.

Welcome to monopoly where one rules certain areas of the market.

At first I was not amused about this too but then I realized that I just had choosen two years of additional 3dsmax subscription and I will not know what features will be in there. Another egg-spline or something more amazing?! Okay I'm in Beta for 3dsmax so I at least know what I will get next year...want to be in lumion beta too.