My best advice is to visit the forums of Lumen RT & Lumion to get a feel for how the users like the software use, results & support. I also tried Lumen RT 2 years ago & found no support, but the features seemed to have improved with this latest version. Unless it's changed a lot from a year ago, it's difficult to use & costly. It has a lot of promise if it gets developed & gets support. Frustrated Lumion users have been posting links to Twinmotion, another realtime software. However, unlike E-on, makers of Lumen RT, the developers communicate pretty well through the forums. But sometimes I get the feeling that the developers are really struggling. I want Lumion to succeed since I have a lot of money in this program. I get the feeling that a lot of people are waiting to upgrade until they see the results & problems of folks who do upgrade.

I lot of former cheer leaders have disappeared over the year. The arrival of V5 this week did not arrive to cheers of hundreds on the forum like last year. What has been very difficult to for many users is that some upgrade features don't work 100% as advertised, such as the grass feature where the 3d blades of grass abruptly transition to a texture at a certain distance from the camera. Then we make still images & videos, very easily & fast. Then we add Lumion entourage & weather effects. All of the materials come into Lumion where we then tweak them. I use Revit to create the building design, export out a dwg to Sketchup, texture the model, export a collada file & then import into Lumion.

Some advanced & talented users, like with any software, get great results. It makes great videos & good enough still images at blazing speeds. The voluntary upgrade cost for small users, $1500 per year, is pretty tough to swallow. I've used Lumion 3 & 4 for the past 2 years with great success.

Lumion vs lumenrt