don’t use it schools use an algorithm that scans images for plagiarism and pirated softwares. If your images are found out, and they will be, your application will be thrown out. Or worse, you will be arrested, especially because by posting this thread you are leaving proof of your intent to use illegally obtained software. 

Just use a pirated version and photoshop the watermark in it ;)

You say you're applying to the highest ranked universities.  If so, this Lumion vs. vray thing is a non-issue, as those schools tend not to like or care about slick renderings anyway. They don't care about your digital modeling and rendering skills or about what software you know.  You could do your whole portfolio with free Sketchup or with Microsoft Paint for that matter, and it wouldn't hurt your chances and might help them.  What admissions committees care about most is visual evidence of your thought process and a sense that you don't give up easily and will obsessively iterate.  To that end a portfolio full of 20 hand-doodled views or crumpled-paper models of the same thing, with slight variations, is much better than one beautiful rendering.   Reworking all your undergrad projects is probably unnecessary - and if you are going to do that you'd be better off recreating the "getting there" design process artifacts than reworking the end product.

Wait, schools care about this shit?

Can you not send them a hard copy? Schools I applied to for my MArch offered that option.

Please, lets not scare the young people here. Schools do not have the capabilities to check for work done on pirated software, nor do they wish to spend the time and effort it takes to find that out. They already spend so little time on each portfolio submission as it is.

With that being said, however, please don't use images taken from Lumion. They're more times than not ugly and sterile. While these may work for commercial firms that care about the bottom line, you as a student should spend the effort to create images that are personalized to your design sense. You're better off taking screens from your model and desaturating the image and then overlaying that with make2d linework.

I suggest you take a look at the successful portfolios for GSD and Yale SOA on issuu. How many Lumion renders do they contain?

https://archinect.com/forum/th...

Don't listen to some ppl above, they just made up something scares you. The cracked version softwares are not good to use, if you are not experienced computer user, may just get you computer infected by virus.

Besides that, as a student, you could use it privately, in your personal computer, and do NOT share it with your friends or mates. Do NOT use it for commercial purpose. These 2 are the baselines. As a previous member of portfolio review board in Univ. , I can tell you we will not to, not need to and do not have time to check what software you use, nor if you are using them with legit lisences. We are more caring about how you use those tools to express and represent your idea.

lol sorry but everyone at my school use pirate software, even some faculty members. There is no way pirate lumion or rhino to make any difference from the real software. You have to think that the software engineers who cracked the software has to write extra code to make it produce different image, like who has time to do that? the registration mechanism of software is completely separated from the actual functions from the software. they are just different files with code

its kind of unfortunately but school do not use any mechanisms to detect plagiarisms in college applications, besides eyes. That means if you used stock image and the professors reviewing your application on an ipad can't recognize copyright issues, then nothing will happen.  Not the case if you put a le corbusier building in there and claim your own because that's common knowledge. I don't endorse it, but unfortunately it all depends on if the professor looking at your portfolio thinks he or she has seem the artwork before