Lumion Advance

Animations

Enter video-mode and create a route

Press on the video logo in the bottom right corner.

Press the record button to create a new route.

Create Route

Now it's time to create your desired route. Navigate around in the window to where you would like to start your animation from. Then hit the + logo in the bottom.

Don't forget that you can put the camera in "eye level" and that you can change the focal length of the camera. This is good to do before since you need to change this for all frames you're creating so it's timecomsuming to change this afterwards!

Navigate to your next keyframe, this will decide were the camera will move towards from the first keyframe you placed. Navigate to your desired position and press the + button next to your last keyframe.

Now we can preview your route by pressing the play button in the timeslider underneith the preview window.

If you're not satisfied with the animation, we could go in and change the two keyframes until we're satisfied. Press on either of the keyframewindows in the bottom and change it to a new position. After that you can press the update logo in order to update it.

You can as well play around with the smoothiness of the animation, on each side of the timeline in the bottom you can decide if you would like the start and end to be smooth or not. Test them out to understand the effect of them!

Keep adding new keyframes if desired, note that the + sign is now replaced by a triangle instead.

The last thing to change now is the length of the clip. That you'll find in the bottom right corner.

Once you're satsified, press the blue sign in the bottom right corner and we'll continue to now adding layers to this animation.

Adding layers

A good start is to apply the "Realistic" template, that will give you a good start that you afterwards can modify to your own preference. That you can find when pressing on "Custom Style" in the top left corner.

Lumion have now added a base of layers that will result in a realistic animation. First thing you probably would like to change is the rotation of the sun and maybe as well the sky it self. This you can do by pressing on the "Real Skies" layer in the left.

If you press on the image of the Sky you can change the current sky with a different one, for example a night, overcast or morning sky. After that you can rotate the position of the sun by moving the slider that says "Heading".

If the slider moves too fast when you're chaning the heading, hold in shift while moving it and it will be slower when adjusting.

Explore more of the effects by pressing the FX logo, what you've already done is enough to keep going but it's always good explore them and get a better understanding of what they can do.

Animating people

Now it's time to animate the people in your scene. To do this we'll need to add the layer called "Mass Move". This you'll find by first pressing the FX button, navigate to the "Animation" category on the left and press on Mass Move.

Now press on the pencil in the Mass Move window and we'll start animating.

If you haven't placed out a person or a vehicle in your scene you'd like to animate it's time to do it!

Now navigate around your scene and add your first path. Place the first arrow underneith the object you'd like to animate and then place the second one towards the direction you'd like the object to move to. This path you're creating will not automatically comfort to the surface so if you're surface is not straight you need to add more then two points. To add more points you simply hold in the ctrl button and you'll be able to add more. Should look something like this.

Preview your animation by first pressing the refresh button to let Lumion calculate the path, then press the play button that will show up.

If your object is not moving, make sure that the first the first point you've added is underneith the object.

If you have more objects in the same area you'd like to animate you can change the width of the path and they will animate as well. You could also use the arrow button to change the direction of the path and as well create a dual directed path.

Feel free to add more paths or adjust/delete the paths you've created. Do that by switching by the different modes in the bottom left corner.

Once satisfied, press the blue logo in the bottom right corner to confirm your changes. It's now time to look at the render settings.

Render

If you have created more than one animation you first need to decide if you'd like to render out only one of them or both of them at the same time. If you'd like to render out just one clip, you'll press the render logo above the animation in the bottom left corner.

If you'd like to render out more than one animation at once, you'll press the big green Render button in the bottom right corner.

Bare in mind, this will render out the hole animation into one clip. That means that Lumion will combine several of animations into one long one. If you'd like to seperate them you either have to render them out one by one in Lumion, or use a program like After Effects or Premiere afterwards in order to split them up.

Now it's time to understand the render settings. First of all you can decide the overall quality, here you'll decide how precise you want Lumion to be when it comes to reflections. I wouldn't go for under 4 stars for this.

Next up is Frames per second, this will decide how many frames Lumion will render out for each second. To demonstrate this you can see here what the difference is between 30 and 60 fps is.

So when it comes to movies, they're all made in either 25 or 30 frames per second since the eye is so used to this framerate that 60 fps will look weird for the eye. But for animation 60 fps is more acceptable, this is up to personal preference just have in mind that a clip with 30 fps will take half of the time to render compared to one with 60 fps!

If the animation you're creating is going to be a part of a documentary or merged by other clips it's important to think of the other clips framerates. For example, if you're combining this with interviews that have been shot in 25-30 fps, you need to render you're animation in similar fps as well. If you would've rendered it in 60 fps, the clip will then be 50% slower when you combine all the clips, if that makes sense! ;)

Last up is quality, i'd usually recommend Quad HD but this also depends on the purpose of the video. If it's going to be merged with other clips it's good to check up what they have in size, and as well it depends on the render time. Whenever you click on either of the fours options of size, Lumion will ask you where you'd like to save it and after that it will start render. A good tip here is to test one quality and see the render time, give Lumion a couple of minutes to calculate approximately the total render time and then take a decision after that!

Lumion will use a lot of your computers power to render out the animation, so if you're planning to work at the same time it might decide to crash since the computer can't handle doing those two things at the same time. If that's the case, just start the render before leaving work and it should be ready the day after. If you're scene is extremely heavy and render time is way too long, Olle can help to put the render on in one of the computers in the VR Area that are more powerful.