LuxCore™ is an advanced rendering engine designed to produce photorealistic 3D images with natural
lighting, realistic material reflections, and accurate shadows. It uses physically based rendering (PBR)
techniques to simulate how light interacts with real-world materials and surfaces, helping create highly
realistic interior and exterior visualizations.

The availability of the LuxCore™ rendering engine depends on your Home Design software edition.

LuxCore™ provides advanced control over materials, lighting, environments, reflections, and rendering
styles, allowing a standard 3D home design to be transformed into a high-quality presentation image.

Key Capabilities

• Physically Based Rendering (PBR)
• Photorealistic interior and exterior rendering
• Day and night visualization
• Advanced lighting controls
• PBR material and texture support
• High-resolution image export
• Batch rendering of saved 3D views
• Realistic glass, metal, glossy, matte, and transparent materials

Photorealistic Rendering

LuxCore™’s primary purpose is to generate realistic images from the 3D model. It manages materials,
luminance, environment lighting, and render styles to produce a more natural representation of the
designed space.

It can be used for both interior and exterior scenes, making it suitable for presenting complete homes,
individual rooms, kitchens, bathrooms, living areas, landscaping, and other architectural designs.
LuxCore™ also supports night-view rendering, allowing the same project to be presented under
nighttime lighting conditions.

Lighting

LuxCore™ provides multiple lighting options for creating realistic illumination, including:

• Sky Light – Provides natural environmental illumination.
• Area Lights – Useful for controlled indoor and architectural lighting.
• Custom Object Lights – Allows objects to contribute customized lighting to the scene.

These options can be combined to create realistic indoor lighting as well as outdoor daylight and
nighttime environments.

PBR Materials

One of LuxCore™’s major capabilities is its support for Physically Based Rendering materials. PBR
materials are designed to reproduce the way real materials respond to light, resulting in more convincing
surfaces and reflections.

LuxCore™ supports multiple material maps, including:

• Diffuse / Color – Defines the primary surface color.
• Specular / Metalness – Controls reflective and metallic characteristics.
• Roughness – Controls how sharp or scattered reflections appear.
• Normal Maps – Adds detailed surface information without changing the actual geometry.
• Bump Maps – Creates additional surface depth and texture.
• Alpha Maps – Supports transparency and cutout effects.

These features allow materials such as wood, stone, metal, glass, fabric, tiles, and other surfaces to
appear significantly more realistic.

High-Quality Textures

LuxCore™ supports high-resolution textures, including 2K PBR textures, which provide additional surface
detail in rendered images. Punch! also provides downloadable PBR content packs containing 2,000+
high-quality textures. LuxCore™ fully utilizes the PBR capabilities of these materials.

High-Resolution Rendering

LuxCore™ supports high-resolution rendering export up to 8K, allowing users to generate detailed
images suitable for professional presentations and high-quality visual documentation.

The rendering/export workflow also provides additional information and controls, including render-time
information and optional filename suffixes for better organization of exported images.

High-resolution rendering is particularly useful when the final image needs to be:

• Presented to clients
• Used in marketing material
• Included in design documentation
• Printed at larger sizes
• Used for detailed architectural presentations

Batch Rendering 3D Views

LuxCore™ also supports Batch Rendering of saved 3D Views. Instead of rendering each camera/view
individually, multiple saved views can be queued and rendered together. The resulting image files can be
saved to a specified folder.

This is especially useful for projects that require multiple presentation images, such as:

• Front exterior view
• Rear exterior view
• Living room
• Kitchen
• Bedroom
• Bathroom
• Landscape views

Saved 3D Views can also retain additional project presentation settings, including visible floors and plans,
decorator palette, photo-render lighting settings, lot specifications, and the active cutaway object.

Typical LuxCore™ Workflow

A typical LuxCore™ rendering workflow can be summarized as follows:

1. Create or open the Home Design project — Prepare the floor plan and 3D model.
2. Apply materials — Assign appropriate materials and, where required, configure PBR maps.
3. Set up the scene — Position the camera and configure the required environment and lighting.
4. Select the rendering configuration — Use LuxCore™’s photorealistic rendering capabilities to generate the presentation image.
5. Review and adjust — Check materials, lighting, reflections, and overall scene appearance and make adjustments where necessary.
6. Export the final image — Generate the final render at the required resolution, including high-resolution output when needed.
7. Batch render additional views — For multiple presentation views, save the required 3D viewpoints and process them together using Batch Rendering.

Key Benefits

LuxCore™ extends Punch! Home & Landscape Design’s visualization capabilities by combining realistic
lighting, advanced materials, PBR textures, and high-resolution rendering in a single workflow.

Its major benefits include:

• Photorealistic Visualization – Produces realistic architectural presentations.
• Physically Based Materials – Provides realistic surface and light interaction.
• Advanced Lighting – Supports Sky, Area, and Custom Object Lights.
• Day & Night Rendering – Allows projects to be presented under different lighting conditions.
• High-Resolution Output – Supports rendering up to 8K.
• Batch Rendering – Makes it easier to produce multiple presentation views.
• Professional Material Control – Supports Diffuse, Specular, Roughness, Normal, Bump, and Alpha maps.

Conclusion

LuxCore™ provides Punch! Home & Landscape Design with a powerful photorealistic rendering workflow
for turning 3D architectural designs into professional-quality visual presentations. Its combination of PBR
materials, realistic lighting, high-resolution rendering, day/night visualization, and batch rendering
makes it suitable for both individual design previews and complete client presentation workflows.