This has now been extended to Rhino, enabling Rhino and Grasshopper data to be synced with Twinmotion in a ‘single click’. To get data into Twinmotion, the 2019 release featured ‘Direct Links’ to ArchiCAD, Revit, and SketchUp. Epic Games can certainly make software cheap or free, but GPU-accelerated Virtual Machines cost money. At AEC Magazine we imagine it would be a cloud service, possibly on subscription or pay as you go. Real time 3D content is becoming much easier to produce, but there’s still a big barrier to getting it into hands of clients, team members or members of the public. Petit would not be drawn on how this feature might be delivered or when it might arrive, but it would certainly help solve a big challenge in the AEC industry. Pixel streaming is where the graphics processing is carried out remotely and not on the client device. ”And to get to there, you need to deploy pixel streaming, right?” “What we would like to have is a solution where everybody gets the same high-quality experience regardless of the device they consume the content on – it could be a phone, an iPad, or a TV in a conference room,” says Petit. Stakeholders face similar challenges to users of CAD or BIM software, insofar as the quality of the experience is highly dependent on the power of their hardware. This is an important development, but Petit admits it is not a perfect solution. The software enables users to share individual projects 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. Sharing projects with stakeholders has been made much easier in the 2020 release with “Twinmotion Presenter”. “If you have low power graphics, that process can take a few minutes, but then you get super high-quality output,” he says, adding that two thirds of the deliverables produced by users of Twinmotion are actually fixed images or a video, rather than a real-time experience. It also has an offline mode where a still image or video can be exported, and each frame then rendered by the GPU. In response, Petit makes the important point that Twinmotion is not just about real time 3D. “We’ve introduced things like screen space global illumination, which is a little bit of a trick, but it allows everybody, even when you have an Intel graphics system, to actually benefit from that.”Īt AEC Magazine we haven’t yet tested the software, but experience tells us that even with these optimisations the application still probably won’t perform that well with an entry-level GPU. Applications like Revit and SketchUp put relatively low demands on a workstation’s GPU, so there has been little need for architects to invest in more powerful ‘gaming’ GPUs. One of the big challenges for Epic Games, and indeed any developer of real time viz software, is how to make Twinmotion work well on entry-level workstations that are typically used by architects. Petit told us that the technology is there, but there are some ‘legal issues with the content’. This has been on the roadmap for some time, even prior to the acquisition, so it’s surprising that this feature is not part of the 2020 release. The idea is that an architect can start a project in Twinmotion for early stage design validation or communication and then hand over the asset to a viz specialist for further development in Unreal Engine. ![]() Twinmotion is based on Unreal Engine, so one of the big attractions is interoperability between the two tools. They are either expensive, or they’re dead-end products, or they’re hard to use.” Which is interesting because, right now, none of the existing products have actually reached that level of volume. ![]() ![]() “When you look at the number of Revit users, the number of SketchUp users, if you want to declare yourself successful in this market, you have to be able to go one million, two million seats, given the size of the market. Marc Petit, General Manager, Unreal Engine Enterprise at Epic Games, told AEC Magazine that he has set his sights on seven-digits in terms of number of users, but admitted that there is still a massive awareness problem. And to top it all, everyone gets two years of free upgrades. ![]() And those that didn’t, can currently get 50% off the $499 purchase price for a limited period. Those that registered for Twinmotion 2019 will now get a free perpetual license of the 2020 release. With this new release Epic Games is continuing its aggressive drive to build a large customer base. Now, just short of half a million downloads, the company has launched Twinmotion 2020. Last year Epic Games took the AEC sector by surprise by acquiring the easy-to-use arch viz tool Twinmotion and then giving it away for free.
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