beestee

I am not very experienced with blender and it's rendering options, but I don't think EEVEE is ideal for what you are trying to accomplish here. A safer start would be with cycles I think. There is a good series of tutorials from blender guru that cover basics on these topics. What you are particularly looking for at this juncture will be texturing, lighting, and rendering: You can go back and develop your skill in modeling and the others once you start seeing a decent result, just to give yourself a little boost in motivation.

These types of moves are always a big deal. We might not see the complete ramifications for another year or so, but it will certainly change the landscape some.

I like the rotring 600, it is a great mechanical pencil. They make an 800 model with retractable tip but I don't think it's worth the price. At the moment my favorite mechanical pencil is the Uni Kuru Toga. It has a mechanism that transfers tip pressure to a mechanism that rotates the lead as you go. It works surprisingly well at keeping the tip of the lead more consistent and sharp. Check out JetPens website. Just a quick glance shows that Ohto still makes mechanical pencils, although not that particular model.

Bravo! This is good stuff, Tom.

I agree with almost everything that has been said here, sorry that I am two weeks late to the conversation but figure I would throw in my $0.02 for anyone else that stumbles across this topic. Enscape and Lumion are currently the best software solutions to what your are experiencing with your team. I would assume that you are already at least trying out Enscape, if not, I would suggest trying it out before Lumion. If you still feel like you need more quality from the renderings after trying Enscape, Lumion will get you a little further. Enscape will make you the most agile in most cases, but as Virgil says, you do have better control over the rendered result with Lumion, especially with materials. There are some odd quirks with Lumion, such as a fixed 16:9 ratio for all rendered output aside from 360 panoramics, and the interface obscures a lot of the power that lies within it. The tools that Lumion has for populating a parking lot, sidewalk, landscaping, horizon break, or being able to show something in glass reflections are quick and intuitive. Enscape has a little bit of this but is not nearly as easy or quick to use. Really the best situation would be to equip your designers with more than one tool since there are pros and cons with each, and there is nothing to say that you couldn't use both Enscape and Lumion on the same project for different needs/phases. This is all subject to change in the near term as well with the proliferation of realtime raytracing. I feel that we are getting closer to having a realtime engine with the quality of offline engines such as VRay and Corona. The main thing holding it back today is that the tools to get there are still pretty rough and require quite a bit of model prep work/clean up. It is a tight race between Unity and Unreal right now to get there first, but we may see one of the specialized packages such as Enscape or Lumion or Twinmotion beat them to it.

Someone needs to make a good set of space aliens that we can put in our scenes. That would change the topic of discussion away from diversity I think.

You don't want the wipe effect, you are just looking for a surface imperfection map. You just need to uvw the windshield and set up the glass material to use the imperfection map for it. Many tools and methods to accomplish this, but the easiest would probably be to just use a planar uvw from the front of the windshield and set up the glass material with the imperfection map in the material slot. You could get the data you need to create the map by rendering a view aligned with the windshield and render 3 of the animation frames of the wipers at each extent and then the center. Start with an appropriate grunge/imperfection map and knock out the "clean" area that the wipers run through. The images below kinda show the idea:

If you are using 3DS Max 2017 or earlier, there is Ky_Trails from here: http://lastjedioutpost.ru/?l=en&p=ky_trail

Lumion's lack of parallel projection is a negative attribute for every real-time engine that I am aware of. Even the ones that have some form of parallel projection, they are very limited in terms of usefulness. This is part of the reason that I like modeling in Revit, if I have a good template to start from I can easily get "color elevations" out of it and just keep the Lumion content more photographic. Sketch-up is equal or better in that regard really, I am just more comfortable with Revit personally. An interesting development on this topic since the last 4 weeks is that Epic Games has updated their learning materials and they now have a TON of content tailored specifically to visualization. I still find the process of working with Unreal Studio to be significantly more tedious than Lumion or Enscape, even with this info available, but I don't think it will remain that way forever. There are also the announcements of Nvidia's new Turing GPUs, and I think the advancements being made with them will directly affect the software being discussed here.

Personally, I can create most building types fastest with Revit. Sketchup comes in a close second for modelling speed. Max in third despite a decade of experience with it. It also depends on the style of the building, the more abstract/organic it gets, the more my list reverses. Rendering has to be considered separately. Real-time is the future of rendering, but it still has limitations that keep the offline render engines such as Corona and VRay relevant. That said, I spend most of my time in Lumion for rendering, second would be Enscape, third would be VRay. I have looked at Twinmotion many times but as a Lumion user they have not yet done enough to catch up in my opinion. I feel that within the next 3 years, the discussion of which real-time engine to use will be pointless as both Unreal and Unity are making their engines more approachable and compatible with each release. Also to consider, if Abvent can follow through on their promises of Unreal export capability, then Twinmotion could become the one to beat, it just depends on if Unreal Studio and the Unreal Marketplace will eclipse it before that happens.

Not possible. One of several quirks Lumion has. Good news is that it doesn't hurt scene performance to have empty layers so you can just hide all the other layers, zoom way out and use the window selection tool to select everything that you want to delete.

Lumion supports pre-baked lightmaps...but it requires a lot of setup: Unity/Lightmapper or Unreal/Lightmass still require set-up and baking before doing a walkthrough, but the process is more integrated with them. Light baking is not standard practice for Lumion since it also requires another render engine to produce the baked light maps and UVs. Enscape, however, does have true realtime lighting. The quality isn't the best, but it is surprisingly decent. Worth taking a look at the demo if you haven't. It also does a pretty good job with VR without any extra setup if you have the hardware to use it.

We use Lumion, Enscape and Corona. We have retired VRay and Mental Ray. Most of our models start in Revit now, a few from SketchUp once in a while, barely open Max more than a few times a year...but when you need extreme lighting accuracy the GPU "game" engines just don't do as well. The only reason we use Corona instead of VRay now is simply the annual cost vs how much it gets used. Get them to upgrade Lumion to the latest version if they haven't, it is a tremendous update for the render quality and would likely make you miss VRay a little less.

This one looks similar, and doesn't cost much: https://cgaxis.com/product/poplar-3-populus/

This is always true, but especially at this moment specifically AMD has just started making mobile versions of their Ryzen processors available which could bring some good performance at lower prices. I still find it difficult to believe that you can get a 15" Surface Book 2 with a 6GB GTX 1060 in it...you'll pay a premium for it, but just the fact that such technology is available in such a form factor blows my mind. My colleague uses a 2016 Razer Blade Pro and it is an amazing machine but he has had a lot trouble with software working correctly on the 4k display so I don't really envy him.