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How do Planar Reflections work?

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Lumion Support Center
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1. Here's how

There are three different reflection types in Lumion:

  • Planar Reflections: Very accurate on planar surfaces but renders slowly.
  • Projected Reflections: Not very accurate on any surface but renders very fast.
  • SpeedRay Reflections (Lumion Pro only): Mostly accurate on any surface & renders fast.

1.1: Add the Reflection Effect to a Photo or a Clip to access the Planar Reflections function:

1.2: Click on the Edit button to add or remove Reflection Planes from planar surfaces in your Scene:

1.3: Assign a Standard, Water, Glass or PureGlass material to surfaces that you have added a reflection plane to. You can also assign Reflection Planes to the built-in Water Planes in Lumion.

Please note that the following objects, effects and materials are not visible in Planar Reflections due to technical limitations:

  • The Ocean.
  • Waterfall, Water, PureGlass and Glass Materials.
  • Fountains, Smoke, Fire and Fog objects.
  • Landscape Grass.
  • Built-in Lumion Water Planes.
  • OmniShadows.
  • Lens Flares.
  • SpeedRay Reflections or reflections from Reflection Planes.
  • Hyperlight, Global Illumination and Sky Light Effects.

1.4: You can change the blurriness of a Planar Reflection by adjusting the Gloss slider of the affected reflective materials. A high Gloss slider value makes the reflections sharper and mirror-like and a low value makes the reflections blurrier:

1.5: Try to use as few Reflection Planes as possible.

  • You can add up to 10 Reflection Planes per Clip, or per Photo, or to the Entire Movie.
  • Every time you add 1 Reflection Plane, Lumion has to mirror all models and render the entire Scene once more, and this can very quickly become too slow.
  • You should also try to check if there are Reflection Planes with no surfaces allocated (no green highlight) in the Scene. Or, the surface is so small from the point of view of the camera that the reflections are not worth rendering. If there are, click on the slot to remove the Reflection Planes assigned. Doing so will help to optimize your renders.

1.6: Adjust the Threshold slider to change the distance at which nearly-co-planar surfaces will be included in the Reflection Plane. The further away a nearly-co-planer surface is from the Reflection Plane, the less accurate the reflections will be.



See also:

Knowledge Base: How do SpeedRay Reflections work?

Knowledge Base: How do Projected Reflections work?

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