January 12 2017

Ivy, Leaves and Climbing Plants in Lumion 7

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Anyone who’s worked in 3D visualization will know how difficult it is to get realistic looking climbing plants, or ivy that clings to surfaces like walls or fences.

Lumion specializes in making tough stuff easy and the solution for adding climbing plants and leafy materials in Lumion 7 is super-simple and effective. Look at the climbing plant on the walls in the image below. Also check out the pyramid-like bushes. These were all created with just a few mouse clicks. This short blog explains how to do things like this in Lumion 7.

Above: Example of the kind of effect you can create using the foliage functionality in Lumon 7.

The tutorial below shows you how to apply leaves and adjust the leaf type, size, spread and spread pattern.

Above: Applying and adjusting the leaf materials.

You can also work with leaf presets by applying them to existing materials. This is really handy, for example if you have a simple object and you want to make it look like a bush, or some other leafy garden feature like the ones in the picture below. 

Above: Examples of leaf material applied to simple 3D models.

Another really interesting application is to import extremely basic tree shapes from SketchUp into Lumion. By applying the leaf materials, you can transform a basic tree into a great-looking generic tree, with almost no effort. 

Above: Example of transforming a basic SketchUp tree using the leaf presets in Lumion 7.

The tutorial below shows you how to apply these preset leaf materials.

Above: Tutorial showing how to apply leaf materials using presets.

If you want to find out more about how to do this, you can find a really good explanation in this tutorial from Michael Brightman.

Above: Leaf Material tutorial demo by Michael Brightman.

The new leaf materials look so good and are so simple to apply that you can now concentrate on being creative instead of trying to get the software to do what you want!