Real-time architectural visualization provides a compelling immediacy that helps stakeholders in architectural projects better understand unbuilt buildings. With the interactive architectural visualization tool Twinmotion, it’s now possible to transform BIM and CAD models into these convincing real-time experiences quickly and easily. Architectural designers benefit enormously from tools that are easy to learn and use, but they also want to create visualizations that provide a genuine sense of presence. Realism is the key to achieving this, a focus of the upcoming release of Twinmotion 2020.
In this article, we’ll provide a sneak peek at some of the new Twinmotion features.
Improved Visual Realism and Lighting
Accurate lighting is a critical part of creating realistic 3D scenes. Twinmotion 2020 improves visual realism with a complete rework of its lighting and shadowing implementation, resulting in a look that feels less like a game and more like real life.
Among many other new lighting features, a new sky model—brought in from Unreal Engine—offers much greater physical accuracy and provides settings that can be adjusted for different effects. Similarly, the depth of field functionality in Twinmotion has been enhanced to mimic the effect you’d get from a real camera. New controls on distance and bokeh, together with the addition of an autofocus tool, enhance the credibility and quality of scenes.
Realistic Trees, Plants, and People
Vegetation that looks like the real thing is another key component in photorealistic 3D scenes. Twinmotion 2020 brings a range of features for generating more lifelike vegetation and propagating it throughout a scene in a more natural way.
The visual quality of trees is far higher in Twinmotion 2020, with a new set of tree assets from procedural organic 3D modeller Xfrog. The texture resolution of materials has been enhanced, we’ve added a new two-sided foliage shader with sub-surface scattering to portray the effect of light filtering through leaves, and all bushes have been replaced by high-fidelity Quixel Megascans assets.
Users can now get a sense of how vegetation will affect an architectural design as it ages, with an option to view the growth of plants and trees across a span of many years. This is key for architects and designers to be able to accurately show clients how a project will look at delivery, a few years later, and then finally once everything is fully grown.
All of the previous 3D animated characters in Twinmotion have been replaced by photoscanned assets and all animations have been reworked using motion capture technology, providing a far greater degree of realism to the way characters look and move. There are also 84 new ready-posed characters available to add to scenes, sourced from 3D design store AXYZ.
Faster and Easier Ways to Add Vegetation
In addition to assets that look more believable, other new features include a time-saving way to scatter vegetation on geometry, such as roofs or in the gaps between tiles, and a tool to change the visual appearance of lawns, fields, and gardens by adjusting options for the size, tint, and dryness of grass, along with wind effects.
Enhancements to the paint vegetation tool enable users to set the density of the vegetation after painting it, while a new layer system in the scene organizer lets them hide and unhide vegetation painted in the project.
The release also promises volumetric lighting, an easy-to-use presentation creator, and a one-click Direct Link with Rhino3d, along with many other updates.
This is just a small taste of the upcoming features in Twinmotion 2020. You can still download the previous version of Twinmotion for free until early 2020.
