Discover the intricacies of global illumination (GI) and the differences between standard and Lumen in rendering. Learn how to adjust settings in Twinmotion and Unreal Engine to achieve the desired balance between realism and performance.
Key Insights
- The article discusses global illumination (GI), a feature of rendering that simulates indirect light, creating soft shadows, warm color transitions, and a realistic ambiance in real-world environments.
- Lumen, built from Unreal Engine, offers real-time bounce lighting and reflections, allowing immediate visual adjustments in your viewport. This is contrasted with standard GI, an older and less dynamic system.
- The article emphasizes the importance of adjusting various settings for optimal results, noting that each scene may require different adjustments and a trial-and-error approach. It also highlights that the choice between Lumen, standard GI, and path tracer should be informed by your desired end goal and quality.
This lesson is a preview from our Revit & Twinmotion Interior Rendering Course Online (includes software) and Interior Design Professional Course Online (includes software & exam). Enroll in a course for detailed lessons, live instructor support, and project-based training.
All right, welcome back. So in this video we're going to continue the deep dive into rendering and this one we're going to focus on lumen and standard real-time rendering. We're going to go click the render button here and we're going to kind of scroll down into some of these these different settings between standard and lumen.
And so if you go into the standard there's global illumination. So global illumination is the simulation of indirect light, light that doesn't come directly from a source like the sun or spotlight. This is what gives real-world environments their soft shadows, warm color transitions, and realistic ambience.
So in Twinmotion global illumination can be toggled and adjusted to help you balance realism and performance. So with lumen is the built-in global illumination is built from Unreal Engine. Lumen allows for real-time bounce lighting and reflections.
That means as you move lights or adjust materials you'll see the effect immediately in your viewport. It's really exciting. The standard global illumination is the older less dynamic system that doesn't rely on real-time calculations.
So all the settings right here for the standard is a little bit on the outdated side. The lumen is much more powerful. You can even just see the glass right from here to here.
Learn Interior Design
- Nationally accredited
- Create your own portfolio
- Free student software
- Learn at your convenience
- Authorized Autodesk training center
You know it's hard to tell exactly how you want to do it because you can obviously adjust the global illumination on the standard versus the lumen. And so we can kind of bounce back and forth on what each of these settings will do. So in standard your global illumination intensity you can increase your slider for just your general lighting how that affects in your in your distance of where the kind of the light is coming from.
And then shadows this is where you can actually adjust some of your shadows the how much shadows we're going to hit on the building. You can do standard or you can do accurate shadows. Accurate shadows are a bit more accurate and they seem to work better.
Going down to miscellaneous this is where you can turn off kind of reflections and adjustments. So not a whole lot of whole lot of settings for global illumination. In lumen there's a little bit more.
So lumen you can adjust your kind of your scene detail your view distance. This sets the view distance from the camera in which lumen ray trace effects will be computed. So how far away from the camera is things going to be done.
I think you want to keep things kind of tight where we wanted to compute things pretty close up in this area. And how fast do these things get updated. The scene detail right here sets the size of which objects are cooled by lumen.
So higher values include more objects but increase RAM usage. So I bump this up I'm going to have more things being touched in kind of edited with. And then going down into my reflection settings I can do optimize or full.
I click optimize and maybe you kind of can see a little bit of kind of some changes here. Now on all of I can increase the quality increase the bounce count all those. Then we got some shadows right shadows is what affects the sun bias and the light bias which increases the size of the sun which would create more softer shadows and would and then smaller some increase more harsher shadows.
But continues and it's kind of like the base of because kind of the lumen setting. However if I go back to environment you can see that there are some or in camera there are some additional let me try to see I believe there are some additional settings that you can you can mess with lumen versus versus not. So yeah that's basically the gist of a lumen versus standard.
A lot of these sliders and dialog box every kind of scene is going to be a little bit different so you will have to kind of do a lot of trial and error. The beautiful thing about global about using a real time engine is you can make these changes instantaneously and they work really well. So in summary you know lumen is Twinmotion's real time GI system so that's their their GI system built into Unreal Engine.
It's incredible it's been updated a lot. Standard GI is the legacy fallback for older systems or quick renders and then path tracer is the highest quality with physically correct light behavior. So the three essential render choices to do this one each one requires a little bit different lighting setup or your environment setup camera setup to make sure you want.
So think about what quality or end goal you want first whether you want to you know a super high polish rendering or more of a working rendering or still a good one but not the time intensive that will help you set things up or if you're planning on doing an animation then start off right away with just doing lumen. All right in the next final video for this lesson two we'll look at the fx settings and export settings for how to export your images and what settings to use for that.
