Pretty sweet, always lots of eye candy on Beckerman's blog.  My favorite program for realtime rendering and moving picture presentation in Lumion, it's easy and extremely effective.  Wasn't there a story here a few weeks ago regarding game engines being used for real time visualizations of planning decision and their impacts?  I lurv pretty pictures, but a program that can tell me my idea will add hours to someone's commute, and fill the bay full of phosphorous is where the real power will be.

I am almost certain a co-worker of mine almost 12 years ago mentioned using gaming this way for architecture - real time.

Back in high school I would use Pov-Ray to make scenes and characters to be switched with the game Doom wad file.

Matthew, real time data would be useful as you may be suggesting.  Realtime Building Code shouldn't be much more complicated...

Another one that is similar to Lumion is called Twinmotion. It's hasn't been released yet, but I'm very interested in it.

I was a vray/mental ray user prior to lumion.  

It looks like both twinmotion and lumenRT are lumion rip offs, they might have some bells and whistles that one or the other doesn't have like all 3d applications.  I'm pretty sure all of them are using open source/open GL/Quake video game drivers for the accelerated rendering capability.  Which is cool, but should also make the software much cheaper/free in my opinion.  

Even though the renderings look more realistic and better out of vray, I can't justify the time spent, re-working a rendering a million times before you can even start to process the rendering or animation (got a week and a render farm?).  

I hope these real-time rendering engines get better for our own profession eye candy purposes.  For now, lumion will amaze any client.  

Must check out Lumion.....

yes, lumion for smaller scale projects, or those with simpler geometry. Try importing a crazy ass rhino file...

If you use Revit and have a good library of Revit materials, http://revizto.com/en/ is a really fast way to get into your model.

scale is not a factor...but complex geometry definitely is.

Check out Brigade by Octane. Will be a gamechanger. http://brigade3.com/

They need to get that noise under control.

I like Unreal Engine 4 a lot for Arch Viz.  It is free and extremely powerful.  It does have a really steep learning curve, especially compared to something like Lumion.  However, with Lumion I believe you will eventually find limitations.  UE4 doesn't have to be super complicated either.  There are tuts like this one that make it pretty straightforward after a minimal amount of time learning:  https://www.udemy.com/3ds-max-unreal-engine-4-easy-real-time-for-arch-viz/?couponCode=freebie