This is a major step forward in its ambition to make Unreal Engine a hub for AEC data throughout the design process. Users can also share 3D scenes through self-executable BIMmotion files that allow clients to navigate projects in real time or in VR without having to have Twinmotion installed on their machine.īut arguably one of the most important features as far as Epic Games is concerned is that there will soon be a link between Twinmotion and Unreal Engine. Twinmotion also offers an easy route into VR with a push button workflow. There is also a phasing tool which comes with more than 90 construction objects, such as excavators and cranes, and allows you to view projects at different stages from ground breaking to final delivery. There are 600+ Physically-Based Rendering (PBR) materials and an object library that includes chairs, tables, furniture, street lights and street signs. Scenes can be brought to life with dynamic vegetation, characters and vehicles as well as lights that simulate real or artificial lighting. Once the data has been brought in, it’s easy to use and even novices are able to create compelling output with ease, including images, panoramas, videos and 360° videos.
Simply click the “See in Twinmotion” button in Revit or ArchiCAD and the entire project is synchronised in Twinmotion in a few seconds. The workflow for architects is very slick. The product has been out for over a decade (we reviewed version 2 in 2011) but over the last couple of years the developers have really stepped things up, introducing live links to Revit and ArchiCAD and swapping out the original real-time engine for Unreal Engine. Twinmotion is a mature viz tool designed for architects and visualisers.
Amazingly, it is making the software completely free until November 2019. And today, Epic Games has acquired the software from its developer Abvent for an undisclosed fee. It turns out that the answer was right under our noses, in the form of a third-party product called Twinmotion. At the time we couldn’t quite work out how this would be achieved with Unreal Engine as it was, particularly as Simon Jones, director, Unreal Engine Enterprise, ruled out the introduction of multiple versions of the software, say one for architectural visualisation, another for auto design. In our conversations with Petit throughout 2018 he maintained that the objective at Epic Games Enterprise was to make a tool that can be used by everybody, not just viz specialists. While Unreal Engine is great for creating polished animations and fully interactive experiences for marketing and presentations, it’s much less suited to quick design validation than these applications are.
and then to go into VR at the push of a button. Such tools offer optimised workflows from BIM software and, with relatively little effort, allow users to produce high quality visualisations with realistic materials, lighting, etc.
In short, it’s simply too complicated for your average architect – particularly when compared to architect friendly viz tools like Enscape, Lumion and LumenRT.
But Unreal Engine has a huge array of features and the interface can be bewildering to those used to traditional Windows applications. Users could import new revisions of BIM models and still maintain any investment they had made in their Unreal Engine scene.Īll of this was great for design visualisers as it dramatically reduced the amount of work they needed to do. The FBX file format was no longer the only viable route in and, most importantly, Datasmith could also manage change. “We’re taking all the ‘boring’ work out of the process and giving users more time to be creative,” said Marc Petit, Unreal Engine’s general manager at its launch in March 2018.Īt the heart of Unreal Studio was Datasmith, a toolkit that allowed users to bring in Revit, SketchUp, Rhino, 3ds max and other CAD / BIM data, optimising and cleaning up geometry along the way. Unreal Studio solved many of the workflow issues faced by those using the powerful game engine to create arch viz experiences for desktop, mobile, AR and VR. To date, it has attracted 250,000 subscribers and it’s still free to download until September 2019. And it sounds like it’s been a huge success. Last year Epic Games made a huge play for the architectural visualisation market with the launch of Unreal Studio beta.