EPIC GAMES RELEASED TWINMOTION 2020 in March of this year, adding new upgrades to the package worth delving into. It is one of the easiest real-time (interactive) rendering packages with the added benefit of being built on the Unreal Engine.
At Autodesk University 2019, back in November of 2019, Anthony and I got a peek into this version. We were so excited by what we saw that the Twinmotion 2020 review became a bit of a group effort, with Anthony—along with my husband, Kevin Cahill, an architect, visualization, and VFX Hollywood professional—all contributing to the evaluation. Anthony provided additional insight and the pros and cons section at the end. Let’s get into it!
Twinmotion 2020 Intro
Initially, Twinmotion was created by French Visualization Studio KA-RA. It was created as a way for architects with limited 3D experience to create stunning still or animated renders for clients. After a brief partnership with the French AEC software company, Abvent, Epic Games acquired Twinmotion in 2019.
Twinmotion 2020 is a real-time immersive 3D architecture visualization tool for efficiently producing high-quality images, panoramas, and standard or 360 VR videos quickly without long render times. Twinmotion combines an easy to use interface with the power of the Unreal Engine 4. It is available for both Mac and PC.
Twinmotion 2020 has many enhanced visuals due to new Unreal Engine features like a physically-based sky and sun model and more realistic vegetation.
Twinmotion is also a great stepping stone for the Unreal Engine environment, and in the future, we hope there is a direct link between Twinmotion and Unreal Engine. It should be stated that being built on one of the world’s top game engines, the exposure Twinmotion has is massive. There are over 436,000 registered users since May 2019, a comparable worth noting as Unreal Engine 4 itself has over 7.5 million downloads. Epic itself is now claiming that Twinmotion is the number one real-time rendering solution used in both architecture and production and the number one rendering solution being tested in all aspects of different creative industries. Importantly for the Architosh’s legacy audience—and this has been noted several times before—it is the only real-time rendering solution native on the Mac platform in addition to Windows, leaving Bentley’s LumenRT and the very worthy Lumion exclusive to the Windows platform.
New Features in 2020 Version
Twinmotion 2020 is based on the 4.24 release of the Unreal Engine, with new volumetric light tools and screen-space global illumination (GI). There is also a new physically-based atmospheric sun and sky model (recently just added to Unreal Engine) and cinematic depth of field (DoF). Kevin, who has been using Twinmotion in archviz production work, noted that color bleed issues from the sun seem to be better if not very much solved entirely.
An example of the Depth of Field features in Twinmotion 2020.
At at a foundation level, the UI/UX is roughly the same though there are several improvements in this area related to feature groups we will discuss in a moment. Twinmotion 2020, like all versions, seeks to deliver professional quality images using an interface that the average architect or non-visualization pro can learn quickly. Some items in the UI are hidden on purpose to simplify the workflow; the challenge for the photo-realistic rendering entrant is remembering what tools exist in the more hidden portions of the UI and learning the logic of why they are there in the first place.
Vegetation Improvements
Vegetation assets are much improved in this 2020 release, being upgraded in polycount from tree models from XfrogPlants collections and brushes from Megascans Library (acquired by Epic in 2019). The selections of vegetation are mostly excellent, a lack of southwestern plants and cacti notwithstanding. Phoenix and Los Angeles architects may get a wee bit frustrated but Epic has already heard about this feedback so we expect a redress soon.
You can now blend different grasses into a vegetation layer and edit their individual characteristics rather than re-apply vegetation adjustments with the brush tools.
Epic seems to have made two primary improvements in this department. One, the image quality is much improved (as already noted). Second, it is now easier and faster to place vegetation and in a more realistic way.
Vegetation scattering uses a brush-based system giving users the ability to paint trees, bushes, and grasses quickly. Painting layers make it possible now to add items to the layer, place them with the brush, and then go back and edit the items on the layer. You can control the growth of your vegetation by selecting the plant or group and using sliders to cycle through the age (and thus usually height, width) of your vegetation.
Trees in Twinmotion 2020 now scale by age intelligently and more realistically, not just by geometry.
New in this release, when you age your trees in particular, they don’t just scale the geometry up and down but change as the tree would actually change over time. When you add trees to a paint layer, you can add two copies of the same tree and individually select and edit its settings, like age (height) and density. You can quickly create more realistic site environs by painting this layer with a brush and then adding species variety to it and then tweaking the settings of each item in the layer to create scale and density diversity.
This also works with grass, both turf type, and wild variety. And speaking of grasses, a new setting tells Twinmotion 2020 to fade the grass as you zoom further away from it, thereby saving your processor resources. There are different distance settings for this. Grasses are processor-intensive so this greatly aids in keeping Twinmotion 2020 running smoothly.
Finally, vegetation works more realistically in animations, including when wind runs through leaves on plants and trees.
next page: Lighting, People, BIM and Other Improvements
Lighting Improvements
While we have already mentioned the visual benefits of a physically-based sun and sky model, Twinmotion 2020 has additional lighting feature improvements. One small but important one is the automatic exposure adjustments to areas of shade and intense brightness.
Automatic exposure functions in Twinmotion 2020 prevent dark shadows from being too dark.
Shady areas now have more light enabling greater visual detail from both ground and vegetation in these darker areas in a scene. Meanwhile, over-exposure of sun-drenched lighter areas of the scene is also implemented. Both contribute to more realistic higher-quality renders.
You can also manually adjust exposure and white-balance levels in the Camera tool settings. Another lighting feature is the new volumetric lighting effects, visible with smog settings and specific light types.
Smog in Twinmotion 2020 set at a low level, with physical sunlight penetrating the sunlight volume.
The smog is increased to 100 percent and light penetrates less through that volume.
There are also lens flares when combined with the depth of field (DoF) improvements, provide cinematic qualities found in much more expensive and more difficult to learn rendering programs.
Lens flares provide stunning cinematic visual qualities, particularly when combined with DoF effects.
Area lights are another new feature in Twinmotion 2020. Another type of light “type” you can provide even light to a specific dimensional area and provide the length and width dimensions along with other settings like attenuation, shadows, et cetera.
The area light tool in this image showing faint outlines of the width and length dimensions of the area light.
Light-emitting glow material applied to lights in this scene.
Another lighting feature is a light-emitting glow material that you can apply to an object. This instantly turns that into a light source but it only works when the object is in the camera’s view. You can’t use it off-scene and expect its light to come pouring into the visual scene.
next page: People, BIM, and Recommendations
People and BIM
One thing that we know for sure about Epic’s plans with regards to the pro markets is they are not going to let their chief rival in Unity exceed them in regards to providing collaboration tools within their environments—and this includes Twinmotion.
Twinmotion 2020 features BCF support to allow collaboration workflows (one way for now) from Twinmotion to BIMs.
Project Review Note is a new tool that functions to allow the placement of notes inside Twinmotion’s viewport. These notes can be attached to objects in the scene and from there you can choose to export the note as a BCF (BIM Collaboration Format) file.
That BCF file can then be brought into one’s BIM authoring platform like ArchiCAD or Revit or Vectorworks. We didn’t test that feature out but see it as a beginning step towards providing more integration with leading BIM authoring platforms. The reality is sometimes you need to be inside a rendered view to understand a design fully and to evaluate and make decisions.
Twinmotion scene with Xray materials.
The new image thumbnails help immensely in organizing and executing renders.
Another AEC industry feature useful for both collaboration and illustration is the new Xray tool. It allows you to attach a material Xray texture to an object and that object then appears transparent through the model. It gives you sort of Superman Xray vision for just those materials. This can be Epic sees this as being useful for attaching to piping, ductwork, and maybe structure.
And for experienced Twinmotion users, they will highly appreciate the new image thumbnails in the export panel. This makes exporting the desired images so much easier. There is also a new Twinmotion Presenter, a self-running executable that the user can package up for their clients. This replaces the older BIMmotion system.
We will close by noting that Twinmotion 2020 features new humans that are much more realistic and feature details such as fabrics on their clothes at a level of resolution that is greatly appreciated for realism. These humans are also animation-ready and a new animation path tool makes setting specific characters on animation paths quite easy.
PC and Mac Notes
It should be noted the better your video card is on your Mac or PC, the better the visualization and detail in textures are in Twinmotion. Twinmotion 2020 requires 8G of VRAM.
What makes Twinmotion so easy to use is the interface with simple controls with an easy to use menu for adding vegetation and entourage assets while customizing with sliders. Twinmotion 2020 runs on both PC and Mac but with a few different results.
PC
We ran Twinmotion 2020 on a high-end PC workstation with 128 gigs of RAM with an NVIDIA RTX video card. Twinmotion 2020 delivers reliability and stability on the PC in this new version fixing many of the bugs in 2019. The new vegetation and entourage update with a much higher polycount add a nice touch of realism to your renders. The NVIDIA RTX card handled the polycount easily without any crashes. There was a minor ArchiCAD bug when you import a scene in Twinmotion and change the textures to Twinmotion textures, and go back to make changes in ArchiCAD when you resync the file the Twinmotion textures you added earlier disappear and the original ArchiCAD textures reappear in the scene.
One final image showcasing the new Area Lights.
So, you have to redo them. This may be on the ArchiCAD side. Sketchup objects imported into ArchiCAD first and later into Twinmotion had problems because ArchiCAD does not support UV texturing. I would imagine anything with a UV texture imported into ArchiCAD may cause issues when you sync into Twinmotion 2020. The textures don’t line up right and have to be resized and reset.
Mac
I have a 27-inch iMac 3.4 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i5 chipset, with 4GB of VRAM on Radeon Pro 520 card running Catalina OS and opened Twinmotion 2020 with an ArchiCAD 22 file and had no major problems.
Considering the recommendation was for 8GB VRAM, I was surprised I got it to work. I also trashed the Epic Games Launcher that can take up a ton of memory. I am sure many of the upgraded features will be limited but it did work. Anthony tested Twinmotion on his powerful iMac Pro Mac running High Sierra OS (the minimum oldest support macOS) and experienced stability issues that he did not have with Twinmotion 2019.
Depth of Field and Volumetric Lighting needs as much VRAM as possible otherwise it may not work properly not showing any result. There are lights that may not appear bright enough. One of the workarounds for the Mac problems was to drop on-screen quality (Preference/Quality) down to medium as it defaults to High. It may also help other issues not mentioned here. I am curious if upgrading to Catalina OS could solve the crashing issues for some High Sierra OS users. I would imagine the Archicad and Sketchup issues I had on PC would also occur on the Mac since it is related to UV mapping problems.
Final Recommendations
Twinmotion 2020 is free to users that downloaded Twinmotion 2019 until December of 2021. I would recommend taking Twinmotion 2020 for a test drive while it is free to work out hardware issues and software issues.
Though Act-3D’s Lumion and Enscape is more widely used, Twinmotion is much easier to learn with a much simpler interface that you can learn in a day or two. It is worth the price and power it gives to users who have never done rendering before. Twinmotion is a lower-cost solution with a smart price point. I think learning Twinmotion is an asset considering that down the road, there could be a connection between Twinmotion and the Unreal Engine. Twinmotion is seeing an uptake of engineering, product design, and architectural firms using the product.
Twinmotion is priced for easy adoption and is available for $499 and $250 for the launch discount. You can follow the roadmap on the company’s website and always count on good analysis and commentary about the product here on Architosh.
Pros: Runs on both Mac and Windows computers with strong average performance specs; easy-to-use interface provides a fast-learning user experience giving Twinmotion high markets for UI/UX; works with direct-links between popular 3D and BIM applications; can easily produce dynamic environmental effects like seasonal foliage, rain, and snow, plus moving people and foliage from the wind. You can also place video textures on objects (good for TVs) and decals on surfaces. Excellent visual quality for a very modest price.
Cons: There are few cons for this product compared to its direct rivals, all of whom limit their addressable market to the Windows world, and most of them are more expensive. However, Epic could do more thorough stability testing, more thorough testing of direct-link add-ons (plugins).
Cost: $499 and $250 (launch discount). Users who already downloaded the free Twinmotion 2019 beta can use Twinmotion 2020 for free until the end of the year.
Editor’s Note
Kevin Cahill and Anthony Frausto-Robledo also contributed to this article.