Revit Tips for Lumion3D Users//

Although it is really easy to place plants and trees on your landscape in Lumion3D, what do you do if you have a fully laid out site or landscape plan in Revit? It will all export won’t it? You might tell yourself that you’ll just export the entire site and the building models in one fell swoop, right? Wrong! Although it sounds easy enough, it won’t work.

Unfortunately, you don’t usually find that out until you import your model only to discover that your fully laid out site is peculiarly lacking in foliage. The problem is that if you are using RPC trees in your Revit design, the RPC tree category won’t properly export as part of your model. Actually, it will export when isolated, but as soon as you have other categories visible then all bets are off as your export will look similar to that shown in the image below.

Truth be told, as nice as the RPC trees are in Revit, 3DSMax and photoshop, they aren’t nearly as nice as the native trees in Lumion3D. But all is not lost, you can get that design exported out and rapidly populate your model with trees because Lumion3D makes it easy.

I’ll make it even easier for you with this handy tip. So, if you want to maintain efficient work habits and reuse the information in your design that is central to your building model, then you’ll certainly want to take advantage of this workflow. When you are getting ready to begin working n Lumion3D, after you run the Lumion Bridge plugin, perform a few additional exports to make populating your model easy inside Lumion3D. Did you know? Lumion3D has a node replacement tool that makes it really easy to place multiple objects in one smooth operation. So plan your exports likes this:

1. Make note of how many planting types you have on your site. With that information at your fingertips, you will use standard Revit tools to isolate each tree type and export them as separate files for import into Lumion3D.

2. With the planting category isolated in a 3D view,

3. Select a tree, right click your mouse and choose Select All Instances In Entire Project

4. With a single type of tree selected, use the temporary isolate element tool to isolate just that tree type. Name this collection accordingly when you export the view, reset the temporary display and repeat this step until you’ve exported each type of tree as a separate file.

Tip: You can also export the isolated RPC trees as DWG files or use the Lumion Bridge export tool. Unfortunately, Revit’s fbx export will not result in a viable tree import file.

5. Now that you’ve got your exported files, you can launch Lumion3D and import your site model by clicking on the import button, then the add new model button, next browse for your site model, and finally click to place the model in the Lumion terrain.

6. Once it is placed on your chosen terrain, go back to the import model tool and choose the first of your tree export models place it near the origin of your site model. In this example I’ll bring in one of the tree exports and show you how to hide the geometry imported and place a Lumion3D tree at every instance of your exported RPC trees. Place your tree import file, then use the move, and change height tools to locate the trees in the correct location both horizontally and vertically.

7. Now to insert a tree at every node, do the following:

a. Set the active tree by clicking the insert tool, pick the tree category and choose a tree from the extensive Lumion3D library.

b. Pick on the “Import Model” tool again, then choose the “context menu tools”

c. Move your mouse over the site model until you can find the origin icon associated with the “trees” model you just imported. You’ll know when you’ve got the right file, cause the trees will highlight, the origin icon will turn green, and you’ll see a tooltip like that shown in the image below.

d. Click on the origin icon and pick “Extra…” and then “Place item on nodes”, then choose “Place current tree on nodes”

e. Once the tree is placed, you can use the Lumion tools resize, change the height, etc. as necessary.

f. When you’re happy with the tree placement, use the material tools and the invisible material to hide the RPC trees.

g. Note: Although the process is complete at this point and you could delete the sacrificial export, it is a good practice to leave the sacrificial exports in place in case the design changes and you need to update the model later.