3D software battle: Lumion vs D5 Render

Today we will talk about the two Architectural visualization 3D software Lumion and D5 Render. We all know that they are real-time rendering software that enable interior and exterior designers to transfer and customize their modeling, making high-quality renderings with their great library and features. 

This article looks at what each software has to offer for 3D artists and designers.

Lumion is a popular rendering software which is developed by Act-3D. In the past 10 years, it has grown so much and made its name in the market. In the past, the quality of renders was low and unrealistic. But during time and a lot of improvements from developers, it becomes more and more popular with easy-to-use interface, fast rendering. Lumion is designed for rendering images, panoramic pictures, and animations.

D5 Render is a real-time renderer based on real-time ray tracing technology. In fact, it combines the benefits of both ray tracing and rasterization to get real-time interactivity and photo-realistic images simultaneously. Although just come to the market in more than 1 year, it has a lot of potential to show.

Lumion is available only on Windows, there is still no version for MAC or mobile app or web-based. The price for a single floating license and 33% of content library is 1499 EUR per user for standard version and 2999 EUR for pro version, it also offers 14 days free trial to test before buying. Support from Lumion is also a reason for its popularity. It offers a lot of reviews, updated articles, tutorials and answers on the official site about the most common questions and problems that users may face when using the software.

D5 Render is free for the Beta version (version 1.6 or lower). It is planned to release a community version for free, which is lightweight and serves well for individual usage and educational purpose. Commercial version is much cheaper than Lumion, with 480 USD per user, with perpetual license and lifetime free upgrades. 

Basically, both Lumion and D5 Render are rendering software (not a modeling one), used for the architectural and design field, especially for landscape architecture, urban planning, and buildings. 

Lumion supports 3D files from the following software: Revit, 3DS Max, SketchUp, AutoCAD, Rhino, ArchiCAD, Vectorworks, Allplan, Bentley, Cinema 4D, and Maya. It enables real-time synchronization (simultaneous modelling and rendering; synced camera views and materials) with Revit, ArchiCAD, SketchUp, and Rhino. 

However, it doesn’t have a direct convert plugin from 3Ds max, which is released by the developers. You will need to use Lime Exporter to do that. This tool allows to convert V-ray or Corona and Fstorm to Lumion. However, the material properties seem to be not remained.

While for D5 Render, SketchUp 3Ds Max and Revit, Rhino, Blender and ArchiCAD are supported now. What is good about D5 Render is that developers released the D5 converter plugin for 3Ds max, which will help your model to remain almost all material and material properties. 

However, you will need to convert your model to V-ray to keep all material, then export to D5 Render. It does not support converting from Corona or Fstorm. So if your file is in Corona or Fstorm, you will need to convert to V-ray, then export to D5 Render. 

Generally, both software display most of their basic options/menus right from the viewport. They both have their accessibility and logical organization, in a hierarchy of menus.

Both software guarantee fast rendering and realistic results. However, each has its own strength.

Lumion has been developing for more than 10 years, and has a lot of improvements. The library and models of Lumion are absolutely stunning and come inside the software, which makes the experience with Lumion more smooth. For exterior, animation and panorama, I think that Lumion will show you a better result, as it has abundant of library, models and effects.

D5 Render on the other hand, is kinda new and young. Its library and model are not so diversified. However, the lighting with ray-tracing combined with rasterization technology and material properties are shown and delivered better in D5 Render. That’s the reason why I think D5 Render will stand out in interior designs.

D5 Render has a minimum list of hardware and system requirements, which is a minimum NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB. Operating system must be  Windows v1809 with DX12 + DXR. If you cannot meet the demands, your computer cannot run the software. You can refer in details at the link here.

Lumion also has a recommended list of hardware and system requirements. However, if your computer doesn’t meet these requirements, you can still run Lumion. Only the experience is somewhat laggy and it might crash. Please refer here for more details.

At iRender, we provide servers that are suitable with Lumion & D5 Render, with the most powerful graphic card nowadays such as RTX 3090 at the price from 3.8 usd per machine hour. 

If you are a Lumion or D5 Render user, we highly recommend server 3A (1x RTX 3090) with the detailed configuration below: 

Once again, we need to confirm that Lumion & D5 Render use a single GPU card to render. However, a good CPU can speed up scene’s loading times. Because of this reason, iRender exclusively provide the Intel Xeon W-2245 with a strong processor base frequency which is 3.9GHz – 4.7GHz, 8 cores and 16 threads on GPU server 3. Here at iRender, we provide you with one of the most powerful GPU currently. It’s Geforce RTX 3090. This GPU card reaches 25,162 G3D mark rating points and have a large 24GB vRAM, which definitely brings much better performance.

Plus, on iRender, we provide you more support than just those config.

iRender offers a powerful and free file transfer tool: Gpuhub Sync. With fast file transfer speed, large data capacity, and completely free. You can transfer all the necessary data into our Gpuhub Sync tool at any time without connecting to the server. The data will be automatically synchronized in the Z drive inside the server, ready for you to use.

The hourly rental for package RTX3090 is 3.8$/h. But you can always save from 10% to 20% with our Fixed Rental feature. For those who’s in need of server more than a day, or have extremely large project, we advise to choose daily/ weekly/monthly rental package. The discount is attractive (up to 10% for daily packages, 20% on weekly and monthly packages), and you don’t have to worry about over-charging if you forget to shutdown the server.

Our support is always online 24/7, helping you to handle the problem quickly, effectively, saving you both time and money.

When you use iRender, you can free your computer during the hardest and most arduous part – rendering. That is also the reason that Render Farm service is becoming more and more popular and essential. However, as far as we know, iRender is proud to be one of the very few rendering service that support single GPU for D5 Render and Lumion.

We always know that software is just a tool, what matters is 3D artists and designers skills. However, seeing that both strengths and weaknesses of those 2 render software Lumion and D5 Render will help you to find the most suitable one for your workflow.

And with the above advantages and the machine configuration package that iRender has just released, we believe that Lumion and D5 Render users will have the most comfortable, quickest, and most effective rendering time.

Register an account today to experience our service. Or contact us via WhatsApp: (+84) 916806116 for advice and support.

Thank you & Happy Rendering!