Friday, October 31st, 2014 Posted by Jim Thacker

e-on ships LumenRT Studio 2015 and GeoDesign 2015

E-on software has released LumenRT 2015, the latest update to its family of products for real-time visualisation, overhauling its core engine and adding support for sculptable terrain and improved animated skies and water.

The LumenRT products enable architects and designers to create animated, visually realistic presentations of their work, and render them in real time with GI, motion blur and depth of field.

They import data from most standard DCC and CAD applications, and integrate with CAD and GIS systems.

New digital nature tools courtesy of the DIVE engine
E-on is calling LumenRT 2015’s new core engine, which draws on the same technology as the developer’s digital nature tools, DIVE – the ‘Digital Immersive Visualisation Engine’.

The platform gives artists the same kinds of brush-based workflows for sculpting terrain and painting vegetation as Vue or Carbon Scatter, and seasonal variation in plants courtesy of its PlantFactory technology.

In addition, the update adds “fully animated 3D skies with adjustable cloud densities and patterns” and a more realistic water generator with adjustable wave patterns and foam.

New animation, BIM and publishing options
The software gains support for a much richer set of BIM information, including attributes, layers and section planes – a toolset e-on calls ‘BIM in a box’ – now including data imported from ArchiCAD.

LiveCubes, LumenRT’s format for publishing interactive demos of 3D scenes, can also now be shared through a standard web browser, making them accessible on most mobile devices.

And the GeoDesign edition of the software gets the option to draw motion paths for objects in the manner of an(i)ma or 3ds Max’s Populate toolset; and to import MicroStation Traffic and VISSIM animation paths.

Pricing and availability
The LumenRT 2015 range is available now for Windows and Mac OS X. The base LumenRT Studio costs $795, while LumenRT GeoDesign – previously a $195 add-on – becomes an integrated product costing $1,495.

You can read a more detailed comparison of the two editions in the LumenRT store. LumenRT Publisher, which enables users to generate LiveCubes, costs a further $995.

Read a full list of features in the LumenRT 2015 product range

Watch videos of the new features on e-on’s YouTube channel