Your model looks perfect in Revit. Clean lines, thoughtful proportions, materials assigned logically. You’ve spent weeks getting everything dialed in. The design is exactly where you want it.
Then you import to Lumion and hit render.

The brick looks like plastic. The wood reads as printed texture with no depth. Glass appears either completely transparent or weirdly opaque. Your carefully considered material palette now looks like it belongs in a video game tutorial about what not to do.

This is the material disconnect that kills otherwise solid architectural work. Cartoonish materials versus photorealistic surfaces isn’t a talent gap or a question of expensive texture libraries. It comes down to three fundamental material properties and knowing how to adjust them without wasting hours.

Default Lumion materials treat reflectivity as a single slider when it’s actually a sophisticated interaction between surface properties and lighting. When you ignore this complexity, wood glows like it’s been over-varnished. Concrete looks wet. Stone appears polished when your design calls for rough-hewn texture.

Wrong texture scales destroy believability instantly. Your brick pattern is twice the size of real brick. Your wood grain is scaled for fence posts, not interior flooring. Your stone tiles read as massive slabs when they should be standard format.

Even a 20% scale error is enough to make materials feel wrong. The human eye is remarkably sensitive to these proportional relationships—we’ve spent our entire lives looking at real materials, and we intuitively recognize when something’s off.

The Material Fundamentals That Create Realism

Professional-looking materials aren’t magic. They’re the result of understanding how three properties interact: roughness, reflectivity, and bump mapping.

Roughness defines how light scatters across a surface. Smooth surfaces like polished marble have low roughness values—light bounces off in predictable directions creating clear reflections. Rough surfaces like textured concrete have high roughness values—light scatters creating diffuse, soft reflections.

Roughness should vary based on context. Exterior brick that’s been weathered for twenty years has higher roughness than fresh interior brick. Wood flooring in high-traffic areas has different roughness than wood in protected corners.

Start with Lumion’s default roughness value, then push it further than feels comfortable. Real materials have more variation than you think. That wood floor? Some boards should be noticeably rougher than others. That brick wall? Areas near ground level should show more weathering.

Reflectivity controls how much light bounces back versus being absorbed. Glass needs high reflectivity with low roughness for that crisp, clear reflection quality. Metal needs high reflectivity with varying roughness depending on finish. Stone needs moderate reflectivity that varies by type. Where granite is polished and more reflective than limestone.

The mistake most designers make is being too conservative with reflectivity values. Real materials reflect more light than we consciously notice. What feels like “too much reflection” in your preview often reads as “appropriately realistic” in the final render.

Bump mapping adds surface depth without geometry. This is where texture transforms from flat image to three-dimensional surface. Bump mapping makes brick grout lines recede, wood grain rise and fall, stone surfaces show authentic irregularity.

Lumion’s bump mapping is called “relief” in the Material Editor. The default values are almost always too subtle. Push bump mapping values higher than seems right, then back off slightly. You want the edge of too much, not the safety of too little.

Landscape-Specific Material: What Actually Works

Grass materials need variation you won’t find in defaults. Real grass has color variation, height variation creating shadow patterns, and directional flow from mowing or wind. The fix isn’t finding a better grass texture—it’s layering multiple grass materials strategically. Use darker, denser grass for foreground areas. Use standard grass for mid-distance views. Use simpler grass for distant areas.

Roughness for grass should be relatively high. Reflectivity should be moderate and vary by condition. Wet grass needs higher reflectivity than dry grass.

Water materials make or break landscape realism. For still water like ponds, including high reflectivity with low roughness captures a mirror-like quality. Add subtle bump mapping to create micro-ripples. For moving water: increase roughness to scatter reflections, adjust flow parameters to match actual speed, and lower reflectivity slightly.

Stone and wood materials need scale precision. For stone, verify the actual dimensions you’re simulating and set your texture scale to match exactly. Adjust bump mapping aggressively—stone should create visible shadows. For wood: grain direction matters. Deck boards run in specific directions. Ensure texture orientation matches how the wood would actually be installed.

The Testing Workflow That Saves Hours

Start with a test scene, not your full project. Build a simple Lumion scene with basic lighting and a few primitive shapes. Apply your material to these test objects. This isolated environment lets you see exactly how the material behaves without project complexity confusing results.

Test cubes show materials on flat surfaces. Test spheres show how reflectivity and roughness behave on curved surfaces. These simplified tests give you clear feedback about the material properties themselves.

Adjust one parameter at a time. Change roughness, render a test view. Change reflectivity, render another test. Change bump mapping, render again. This tells you exactly which parameter produces which effect.

Document your settings as you test. A simple spreadsheet noting material type, roughness value, reflectivity value, and bump mapping intensity gives you a reference library that grows more valuable with every project.

Compare against reference photos constantly. Find high-quality photos of the materials you’re simulating. Put them side by side with your test renders. Photography reveals truths about materials that our memory doesn’t preserve accurately. Reference photos keep you honest about whether your settings are producing realism.

Professional quality isn’t about perfection. It’s about pushing every material just far enough toward realism that no single element breaks the illusion. Your client doesn’t need photographic perfection. They need believable enough that they’re focusing on your design decisions rather than wondering why materials look fake.

The confidence that comes from understanding materials transforms how you approach projects. Instead of hoping your renderings look acceptable, you know they’ll look professional because you understand exactly which settings produce quality results.

Ready to Master Materials That Look Real?

If you’re frustrated by materials that undermine your architectural work, tired of renderings that look obviously fake no matter how much time you invest, ready to understand the systematic approach that produces photorealistic surfaces, it’s time to learn the complete workflow.

The Essential Revit-Lumion Workflow Toolkit includes the exact material setup process that produces professional results, from Revit material organization that translates cleanly to Lumion through the testing workflow that lets you dial in any material type efficiently.

Professional materials aren’t magic, they’re methodology. Get the Essential Revit-Lumion Workflow Toolkit and learn the material fundamentals that transform your rendering quality immediately.