so many hours in lumion.... (OJB houston)

I've spent like 40 hours placing 13,000+ plants in Lumion. here's what I learned.

You can mass place people, cars, plants, trees, using the line placement tool. You have options for randomizing direction, offset, distance, spacing, the number of objects, and the kinds of objects. If you wanted a large mass of people on a flex lawn, you could use the mass place tool, draw a line, scale up the offset, randomize direction, and add a bunch of people to the place list and it randomly places all your people! Its easier to edit a mass placement then to focus on placing people one by one. You can also mass place cars in a parking lot.

Your imported models can be more than just your base! You can import people, objects, furnishings, plants, trees, anything that someone could want in a model! We imported a sketchup file of a massive kinetic sculpture piece, and while it doesn't move in the file, it adds a new layer of detail and complexity to your renderings. We imported tennis balls, soccer balls, beer glasses, pizzas, and picnic blankets to our model. If you select your model, alt-click the refresh model and you can replace it with a separate file in the same coordinates.

When choosing what to place, you can find newer models in the later pages of Lumion's library. The old cars look really bad next to lumion's newer cars. If the icon for an item has a logo in the bottom corner, it's probably a newer nicer model. Lumion's newer cars have wheels that can turn, people in the driver's seat, and a cleaner, more realistic look.

Lots of plants in lumions library can be scaled to represent plants in your plant palette. Its better to choose a handful of plants before you start your model to make the process of placing plants easier. you can lose a lot of time sorting through lumion's plant library. For example, I scaled a marsh marigold by 1.5-2.5 to represent a giant leopard plant. Avoid 2.5/2D plants, they look bad. To make your plants look realistic, randomize their rotation a few times and randomize their size by 10-20%. You can also change the hue/saturation of plants based on the look you're going for. (Ex: I scaled the corn stalks down and changed them to a red/purple to imitate the flowers of a pickleweed plant. not perfect, but still added a pop of color). Alt-select-drag to copy objects quickly, but if its plants, make sure to randomize after to make it look more natural.

If you're in rhino, you can add a pdf on your models surface. This means if you have a planting plan, you can drape it on your model, bring it into lumion, and start placing plants based on the hatches! It's basically a paint by numbers. I haven't tried this, but Carlos told me about it. If your firm uses rhino, I'm jealous.

If you want an iris bed but want to thin out the flowers, you can scale up mondo grass and place it at the base of your iris, this makes it look like a complete iris plant instead of a few stems with only flowers...

You can also add in beach cabbage (0.75-1.25 scale) as a ground cover to imitate wild growth in bioswales. OJB doesn't like to have the ground showing through the plant beds, so this came in handy.

You have a limit of 20 layers. I had my plants, trees, people, cars, and imported models on separate layers. Lock your base model to prevent mistakes. Put high quality vegetation on its own layer, large files, detailed objects, and moving 3D people slow down Lumion. Layers can let you turn things on and off so you can work smoothly.

Making a video is impressive. Making a video with moving cars and people is even more impressive. Use the move effect in lumion's video maker to move your people along a path. Use the advanced move effect to move a row of cars down the street (with advanced move, you can change the direction, speed, offset, and you can add nodes for slope changes and possibly turns).

trees OJB uses:

Common Linden M2 - classic tree. she looks good.

American Sycamore L3 HQ - good street tree

Japanese cypress M - good bald cypress replacement

Green Ash M HQ - some variation



If you already knew this stuff, I don't care. here's some pictures of what I did. (I didn't make the model, I hate SketchUp, I just made it look pretty) Also, I didn't export these renderings... views r kinda iffy. Eventually these images will go into a program that generates a watercolor effect, so it'll look less lumion when its ready for the public.

you can't even see how many plants there are in these renderings, maybe I'll get better exports once I have access to the file, she's rendering a video right now 🤩

y'all ever heard of the Tetris effect? consider me Tetris affected. I saw lumion in my dreams. I started looking at people as possible 3d models for my rendering.


Not many life updates. I miss my dog. I started a new video game, Hades. It's super good, definitely recommend, the story is awesome and the art is so pretty. really well designed game.


💖💖💖


Hope this was helpful!


ellen