How to Use Reawote Assets in Lumion

A good material in Lumion should look convincing because the right surface information is connected — not because you spent an hour compensating for the wrong maps.

Lumion's Standard Material supports a metallic/roughness PBR workflow, so most Reawote materials can be rebuilt directly from the maps included with the asset.

Connect them correctly, match the real-world scale and the material is ready to work.

In short

• Use a Standard Material and connect the Reawote Color, Roughness, Normal, Metalness, Displacement and Opacity maps where relevant.
• Reawote exports OpenGL Normal maps, while Lumion uses DirectX. Enable -Y / Flip Green Channel after loading the Reawote Normal map.
• Use Map Scale together with the real Texture dimensions shown on the Reawote asset page.

Download the right Reawote maps

Before opening the Material Editor, prepare the Reawote asset for the way it will be used in your scene.

A Reawote PBR material is a set of texture maps describing the real surface. You do not need every available map for every material.

1. Open the PBR asset you want to use in the Reawote library.
2. Check its Resolution, Texture dimensions and Included maps.

3. Choose the resolution that fits your scene. 2K is sufficient for many general-purpose surfaces, while 4K is a good choice for close-ups and visually important materials. Use 8K only when the extra detail will genuinely be visible and your available VRAM allows it.
4. Download the PBR material package.
5. Prepare the maps that are relevant to the material:

• Color / Albedo → Texture (Color Map)
• Roughness → Roughness Map
• Normal → Relief / Normal Map
• Metallic → Metalness Map
• Ambient Occlusion → no dedicated AO texture slot in the Standard Material
• Displacement / Height → Displacement Map
• Opacity → Opacity Map

If the Reawote package contains both Roughness and Glossiness, use Roughness directly.

Start with the maps the material actually needs. There is no benefit in forcing an unsupported map into another slot.

Bring the material into Lumion and connect the PBR maps

Lumion's Standard Material is the main starting point for Reawote PBR surfaces.

1. Open the model in Lumion.
2. Open the Materials editor and select the surface you want to change.
3. Under New, choose Standard Material.

Base Color and Roughness

Load the Reawote Color / Albedo map into Texture (Color Map).

Then load the Reawote Roughness map into Roughness Map. Roughness controls how sharp or soft reflections appear across the material.

Use a Reawote Roughness map directly. If you only have a Glossiness map, Lumion can invert it for use as Roughness.

Normal and Metalness

Load the Reawote Normal map into Relief / Normal Map.

Reawote normals are OpenGL, while Lumion uses DirectX. Enable -Y / Flip Green Channel after loading the map — the full Normal workflow is covered below.

Load the Reawote Metallic map into Metalness Map when the asset contains real metallic areas.

Keep non-metallic surfaces such as wood, stone, plaster, ceramic and fabric non-metallic.

Displacement and Opacity

For materials with stronger surface relief, load the Reawote Displacement / Height map into Displacement Map.

Make sure Relief is set above 0%, otherwise the Displacement effect will not be applied.

Keep the displacement strength realistic. Stronger is not automatically better.

For cutouts or transparent areas, load the Reawote Opacity map into Opacity Map.

Lumion's Standard Material does not provide a dedicated AO texture input, so leave the Reawote AO map unused rather than forcing it into another slot.

Get the Normal map direction right

Reawote exports Normal maps in OpenGL, while Lumion uses DirectX.

Load the Reawote Normal map into Relief / Normal Map, then enable -Y / Flip Green Channel to convert the Y direction for Lumion.

Do not confuse this with Inverse Normal Map. Inverse changes the perceived depth direction, while -Y / Flip Green Channel specifically corrects the Normal-map Y axis.

Match the material to its real-world scale

Reawote lists the real Texture dimensions for each material, so you can match the material to the physical product instead of scaling it by eye.

1. Check the Texture dimensions on the Reawote asset page.
2. In Lumion, set Map Scale to a custom value to define the texture size in real-world units.
3. Check the result against geometry whose real dimensions you know.

In Lumion 2023 and newer, a custom Map Scale is measured in world space — for example, a value of 1 m represents a one-meter texture scale.

Setting Map Scale to 0 uses the UV mapping imported with the model.

Fix the most common material problems

Most issues come down to a few simple checks:

• Surface detail looks inverted — make sure -Y / Flip Green Channel is enabled for the Reawote OpenGL Normal map.
• Material looks too glossy — make sure you loaded Roughness, not Glossiness, into the Roughness Map. If you use Glossiness, invert it first or use Lumion's inversion control.
• Wood, stone or plaster looks metallic — check the Metalness Map and keep non-metals non-metallic.
• Displacement is not visible — make sure Relief is set above 0%.
• Pattern looks too large or too small — match Map Scale to the Texture dimensions shown in Reawote.
• A map is missing from the material — assign it manually to the correct Standard Material map slot.

Save the finished material for the next project

Once the material is mapped and scaled correctly, save it so you can reuse it without rebuilding the setup.

1. Open the material's Context Menu.
2. Choose Save to Custom Materials.
3. Give the material a clear name and category.
4. Reuse it later from Custom Materials.

You can also save the material as an .LMAT file when you want to transfer it manually between projects or machines.

Once the maps are connected and the scale is right, the material is ready to move with you from project to project.

Less setup. More designing.

Explore PBR materials in the Reawote library →