Epic Games Announces Release of Twinmotion 2020

Readers who are already Twinmotion users will be excited to hear the news that Twinmotion 2020 is now available. The new Twinmotion 2020 features powerful new visualization capabilities and, unlike major rival real-time rendering tools, is available on both Windows and Mac platforms.

New in Twinmotion 2020

Twinmotion 2020 is a real-time, interactive visualization software that delivers excellent renders and animations to professionals in architecture, design, construction, urban planning, landscape architecture, and related fields. Users can quickly and easily communicate their designs to colleagues and clients in a minimum of clicks.

Twinmotion 2020 is now out and offers greater realism and tons of new features.

Key new features focus on new lighting, vegetation, material options that let users increase realism and design faster.

“We have seen incredible adoption of Twinmotion within the architectural industry, with almost half a million Twinmotion registrations since it joined the Epic suite in May of last year,” shared Marc Petit, General Manager, Unreal Engine, Epic Games. “It’s always our mission to make high-end visualization more accessible to all users regardless of experience, and Twinmotion 2020 is the most robust release to date –enabling high-quality visuals in real-time, while still being extremely intuitive and easy to use.”

A sample rendering of the new Twinmotion 2020, featuring new Glow material options.

Here are key descriptions of new features:

• Enhanced lighting and rendering — An array of new lighting features have been introduced, including a new screen-space global illumination (SSGI) method for dynamic indirect lighting, a physically-based atmospheric sun and sky model for more realistic exterior renders at different times of day and year, an area lighting tool to accurately fill spaces with diffuse lighting, a volumetric lighting tool for accurate light ray effects through particles such as fog or smoke, and cinematic depth of field.
• Enhanced vegetation system — Users now have access to all new high-fidelity tree assets from Xfrog, and bush assets from Quixel, containing various age and season options; sub-surface scattering tools accurately filter light through leaves. A new vegetation growth tool allows users to see how vegetation will look within a property over time, from first planting to full growth. Users also have increased control over landscapes with new grass customization options, a new vegetation scatter tool, and improved vegetation painting.
• More realistic humans — All 3D animated characters have been replaced by new high-quality photo-scanned character assets from AXYZ design. Users can choose from 62 animated characters, each with 5 clothing variations, or 82 ready-posed characters.
• Rhino One-Click Support – Rhino is now supported by Twinmotion’s DirectLink feature, enabling users to sync their Rhino and Grasshopper data into Twinmotion with a single click. Organization and hierarchy are retained, and native materials are automatically substituted with Twinmotion PBR materials.
• Project presentation and viewer – Twinmotion Presenter enables users to share an individual project in a standalone viewer in a lightweight package, with the option for multiple points of view and camera paths, and either a locked view, guided, or free-to-explore options for viewers. A new note tool also lets users annotate elements within a scene for streamlined project review and information sharing. Notes can be exported to Revit, ARCHICAD, and many other BIM packages.
• New material and texture options — Users can now import and use H264-encoded video as a material, enabling animated features such as a TV playing or a flickering fireplace. A new Frosted Glass material makes it easy to simulate translucent glass (such as privacy windows) and accurate light scatter. An enhanced Glow material uses screen-space global illumination (SSGI) to enable those objects to act as a light source. Additionally, a new X-Ray option lets users see the position of objects occluded by other objects, allowing for easy visualization of MEP data such as pipe or air duct locations.

Pricing and Availability

Licenses of Twinmotion 2020 are available now as a special offer to new users at a 50% discount off the US $499 purchase price, plus free upgrades through December 2021.Early adopters using previous versions of Twinmotion get access to Twinmotion 2020 free of charge, and free upgrades through December 2021.

A new X-ray render mode enables items like MEP items to appear in renders in ghosted form.

Please see https://www.unrealengine.com/get-now/twinmotion for a full list of pricing and licensing information.