July 16, 2011, 02:52:26 am
If character/object animation in general is planned and indoor lighting will be added you can easily do cinematics as well with it, or just quick and good quality visualization videos...
Instead of waiting for an HD video rendered with 3ds/Maya/Softimage you simply export your scene, setup materials and you're done.
The main point is, if this engine will be like this in future release ( simply and fast to use, very strong features ) it will be easily a valid ( better? ) substitute of Mental Ray/Vray
Well there is something that can do that now and it's free... but the pipeline to get stuff into is... less than friendly... a lot less. So if Act can do this, for Lumion it will be really amazing.
However, while I agree that the graphics are wonderful, I wouldn't go as far as to say it's better or as good as Mental or V-Ray. They use raytracing and actual AO which is a bit more accurate. Also they have a few other things (subsurface scattering and the like) that aren't yet here.
Now if Lumion 2 starts unlocking ALL the features of DirectX 11 (kind oflike Epic's Unreal engine) THEN we will be in a wonderful spot... all this being said, Lumion is developing nicely and I have a feeling that Lumion is the base for Quest 3D version 5 which will be a full game engine.
All THAT being said, quality verses time say that Lumion clearly wins over the raytracing apps for speed and ease of use.