Shedding emphasis on the design’s finer points, aesthetic appeal, and texture in Lumion 12:
At its core, the Regency Project is a conceptual demonstration to underscore the impact of lighting in architectural visualizations. Once again, storytelling is at the heart of the creative process.
And to tell a cohesive story about this project, Adam built the entire scene around lighting, focusing on how lights can accentuate the personality of the building.
He refers to it as “painting with light,” and while rendering with Lumion, it’s a helpful concept to keep in mind as you set up the overall lighting arrangement for your scene.
It can be a little scary when you first start out and look at your environment without any lights. You might be wondering where to begin. Thankfully, Adam has a solution for this as well—called it’s “Zones.”
This enables you to tackle the lighting for your project one little region at a time. Adam takes into account two angles to establish these zones:
- Realism: What kind of technical lighting is required to illuminate the structure and its surroundings?
- Aesthetics: How can we use lighting to infuse spaces with character?
For instance, the main entryway and windows of the Regency Project were one of the key zones. For viewers to see better in our dim setting, this area needed a lot of practical lighting, such as the interior and ceiling lights.
Setting this up required a combination of Lumion’s many lighting options, including spotlights, omni lights, and area lights.
“Guide lights” were used to create the next lighting zone. These direct attention to particular design components. For instance, the shot of the lights on the bollards guides the audience along the sidewalk.
In the garden, you can also locate “guide lights.” In addition to using the same combination of lighting elements as before to illuminate this scene, Adam also included a number of spotlights and omni lights to direct attention to the other, equally significant aspect of lighting: shadows.
It’s simple to over-light a scene, Adam said. Shadows aren’t always a bad thing, but it might be easy to overlook that while lighting an architectural scene. As visualizers, we try to illuminate as much of the space as we can in order to portray as much of it as possible. However, it is possible to demonstrate how your construction materials actually interact with the light by balancing light and shadow.
The “hero lights” zone was the last to be completed and, in Adam’s opinion, the most enjoyable. The majority of these lights have a significant impact, enhancing the building’s aesthetics and the feelings it portrays.
Adam said, “They create dramatic effects that set the design pieces apart, turning the structure into the spectacle we see in the final shot.” With the lavish feature lighting that emanates from the design’s vertical fins, you can plainly see this hero lighting in action.
Adam advises using different Lumion light objects to fill your environment with useful lights, guiding lights, and hero lights while using a hybrid approach to lighting that combines logic and style.