From Archicad to Lumion lights

[kamennikolov]

Hello everybody!

I have a few questions.

Is it possible to extract light objects and sources from Archicad to Lumion?

 

Can you achieve the effect of the neon light shader in Artlantis, where you can have a random surface, that not only emits light, but also illuminates other objects and casts shadows? The emission setting in Lumion only emits, but doesn't illuminate.

 

Every time I export billboard trees from Archicad the textures are missing, why?

 

Thanks in advance!

[Nicolai Bongard]

Not sure if lights are exported in the Lumion DAE file format, but the process of going into 3d view and saving your file, thus getting all the visible elements exported works when exporting to .3ds.

There is a plugin for Archicad available for export to lumion: https://lumion.com/archicad-exporters.html

 

From a bit of googling it looks like they may not cast shadows. Perhaps in some newer version it works, i dont know. However you could possibly fake it by placing lightsources next to your emissive surfaces.

 

Not sure why they wont export, but you should be able to find the textures somewhere in your archicad library, so you can export the textures manually.

[kamennikolov]

Hey! Thanks for the reply!

I'm using the Archicad exporter from AC 21 to Lumion 8. Even tried to export from Artlantis or Sketchup bit no effect. I'm making a small city park, but it has more than 200 lights sources that come from the street lamps. I want to avoid placing each one again manually. There should be a smarter way, but I couldn't find any. Same goes for the neon lights. Artlanits imports everything no problem, but Lumion looks superior when it comes to landscapes and vegetation.

 

The problem with the trees is that they they come with exact cutout to the texture and once displaced it's really hard to fix it. I recently discovered that sometimes textures on TV screens and picture frames also don't export correctly or are missing.

[Nicolai Bongard]

The materials/surfaces in Archicad are based on setting a size for the texture and then it will correctly map with that scale onto the geometry. For "special cases" such as cutout/billboard trees, TV screens and similar objects, they do not have a material setup, but use some sort of easy fix and the textures will scale to the individual objects, so that is probably what is causing them not to get exported properly. I see that Lumion has a function to replace proxy objects with other objects, you may want to research that further, as it in theory should grant you the possibility to place lights instead of the proxy objects.

[kamennikolov]

You are right, the proxy trick may solve some of my problems! I hope in the future they add the importing of lights as a function.

Thank you!