I first tried out Twinmotion back in 2012. Eight years ago, real-time rendering programs were cool, but they were just that, cool. You couldn't make an image that would pass as something reasonably realistic. They were just too "game-y".
I ventured back into the world of real-time rendering back in 2015 with Lumion. If you have been following this blog over the last five years you'd know how big of a fan I have become of Lumion (check out all the review and posts here). But, you may have also noticed that my Lumion 9 and Lumion 10 reviews had a bit of frustration in them.
Well, my frustration at the latest release of Lumion and a demonstration I saw of Twinmotion 2020 made me want to take the proper time and give Twinmotion a try.
Therefore, I've spent the last 2 months using both Lumion 10 and Twinmotion 2019 to create renderings, animations, and project scenes. More recently, I've spent the last couple of weeks with an early copy of Twinmotion 2020!
Well, let's just say Twinmotion has been a refreshing change of pace and I am very impressed.
Keep reading to view my ultimate review of the new Twinmotion 2020...
Before I jump into the review I wanted to let you know that I am going to try my best to make this a review of Twinmotion 2020 and not a compare/contrast Lumion and Twinmotion post (that will come later). The introduction story was meant to give you context as to why I decided to finally spend much more time in Twinmotion.
Overall, I have been extremely impressed with many aspects of Twinmotion 2020. Instead of breaking down this review into "Pros" and "Cons", I decided to use "Things I Like" and "Things That Could Use Improvement".
Here is the video review (followed by a more detailed written review):
So, let's start with "The Things I Like" about Twinmotion 2020:
Things I Like:
Speed
The one thing you will notice with Twinmotion 2020 is that it runs extremely fast. Twinmotion 2020 is built on top of the Unreal Engine which is known for a high quality look with an efficient use of your hardware.
How fast? Well, on my laptop (click here to see a review and specs on the laptop I use) a blank/small scene will run at 120+ frames per second (FPS). With a large (4+ GB in size) and fully modeled (trees, plants, cars, buildings, people, etc...) scene and all reflections/shadow settings on I am still getting 20-30 FPS. If you are not familiar with real-time rendering programs 20 FPS is still a completely manageable frame rate for building a scene.
Panning, orbiting, and flying around a fully rendered and detailed scene at 60-90 FPS is just simply a glorious experience. You have to see it for yourself...
Visibility "Layer" System
Why? Why are there only 20 in Lumion?!
Well, Twinmotion 2020 (and 2019 for that matter) have unlimited visibility layers.
That's right, never again will I have to combine models, manage duplicate elements, or carefully plan out my Layers/Variations again.
Not only are the layers unlimited, but they can be managed through a simple folder structure and "Phasing"... You can drag, merge, rename, copy, and pretty much do whatever you want with the layer visibility tree. And then save whatever visibility state you created as a "Phase" for quick toggling and assigning to camera views.
The freedom and control of model/element visibility within Twinmotion is such a joy to have and removes what would normally be a major hurdle in my use of real-time rendering engines.
User Interface
I'll just quickly comment on the overall user interface (UI) of Twinmotion 2020. At first, I wasn't sold on the main panel across the bottom and two "pop-out" menus on the right and left.
After a couple of months of usage, I have learned to enjoy it. The nice thing about it is you are not really ever searching for anything. There are only a couple places your options and controls can live. I am still sort of getting used to the "More" option on most items and the way each setting has a hierarchy within the main bar on the bottom.
Overall, I would say the UI is on par, if not slightly more simple to use, than most of it's competitors.
I do wish, however, I could have a little control over the size of the main bar and side menus. Sometimes I want to work with a larger build view and don't really need the huge bar on the bottom to be as big...
Model Library
Generally speaking, Twinmotion has always had a decent context model library. But, in previous versions the trees, plants, and people were not all that realistic. Having hyper realistic content is a must with real-time renderings engines. Otherwise, there isn't much point in them being real-time.
Thankfully, Twinmotion 2020 took major steps with their content. Through the help of acquisitions (Quixel) and partners (XFrog) they have completely revamped their content and material libraries.
The difference is pretty impressive.
Not only are all of the people more realistic but they are animated and pose-able. This gives you endless options of what you can do with any character and also adds quite a bit of liveliness to your scenes.
You can even make a construction worker dance:
The trees and plants have also been overhauled in 2020. The material mapping and detail are a welcomed improvement over the older library. Additionally, most of the vegetation has a "growth" setting instead of "scale". This is super cool. Instead of simply scaling up the same model, the trees will evolve through their life-cycle adding branches, leaves, and trunk diameter.
With this feature the same tree can look like 100 different trees of different sizes.
Plus, it looks super cool when you do it:
"Vegetation Scatter"
"Vegetation Scatter" is a brand new feature to Twinmotion 2020, and it is awesome.
Vegetation scatter randomly places whatever selected vegetation you want by material. I stress, "by material. Once placed, you can modify the vegetation "growth", density, etc...
What will this do for you? Simply put, you can build an entire forest or grassy field in seconds. And it looks extremely natural.
Check it out:
In previous versions of Twinmotion the only way to generate a forest or add grass was to paint the vegetation. Once painted, there was very little control over the vegetation's visibility and settings.
Image/Movie Quality and Speed
The developers of Twinmotion 2020 told me they put a primary focus on making the software look less "game-y" (more realistic) with this release. And it shows.
To get more technical, they added "enhanced physical based lighting and shadows", a "physical sky", and volumetric lights/particles. Basically, they worked really hard on making the scenes look more realistic without destroying performance.
If you've done any research on Twinmotion 2019 you will have found lots of impressive renderings and animations. But, if you watch some of the "making of" videos for those animations you would see the user did a few of the following things: added dozens of artificial lights shining in the window to get better shadows and reflections than the sun, added "shadow decals" to improve the depth of shadows, and so on...
With 2020, Twinmotion tried to eliminate some of these work-arounds used to produce more realistic scenes. Although the updates are subtle, they are definitely noticeable when comparing 2019 and 2020 scenes.
Either way, with the right settings the outputs (images and animations) are now comparable to any other real-time renderer on the market.
The big difference, in my opinion, is the speed. When it comes to real-time rendering programs many of them still "render" the exports. That is, they may do some ray-tracing or adding of details, etc... that wouldn't make sense in the build-mode.
The result of this extra rendering process can be extra long rendering times and/or an output image that doesn't really look much like your real-time scene.
Twinmotion has done a great job on this front. Exports (images or pictures) are extremely quick (I just ran fifteen 4K images of a very large city scene in less than 6 minutes) and look very much like your real-time scene... That, to me, is how a real-time rendering program should be.
The follow image was made in Twinmotion 2020 and "rendered" in 18 seconds at 4K resolution:
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| "Raw" Rendering from Twinmotion 2020 |
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| And with a little post-processing... |
Price
One thing you will probably like just as much as me is the price of Twinmotion 2020.
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.
Please click here for a full list of pricing and licensing information.
Things That Could Use Improvement:
Ability to Save/Copy Settings
So far, this is probably one of the biggest pet peeves of mine with Twinmotion. Currently, there is no way to save or copy settings from one image or animation to another.
What does that mean for you?
Let's say you have a scene and you want to create four different images. You create one image, change the light, sun, shadow, effects, etc... settings to what you want. Then, if you create 3 more images of different camera locations those new images will inherit your current settings.
But... What happens when you want to change the sun settings for all four images after the camera view has been generated? That's right, you have to go into the sun settings on each camera individually and modify them to match each other manually.
On four images, not so bad, but what about 30 or 40 images? Not so fun.
Being able to save (or even copy) these settings from one image/video view to another would be a great improvement.
Import Objects UI
This is just a minor little quirk I noticed and stems from my mention of the overall UI above. When you import objects the "Import" area of the main tool bar could be more customization. If your scenes start to use a bunch of Revit imports, for example, you'll only see the end of the file name...
On top of only being able to see the end of your file names, showing imports as large icons in the main tool bar makes it very difficult to find the import you want when that list grows...
My suggestion would be to just make it more like a file explorer would be. Give us the options of seeing icons, file names, etc...
Virtual Reality (VR) Mode
I was pretty excited to try out Twinmotion 2020 with my HTC Vive headset. Typically, I have been using Enscape3D for all of my VR work. The ability to use the same scene for renderings and VR is an exciting concept.
Additionally, using a program like Twinmotion, as opposed to Enscape, opens the door for the use of content beyond Revit. For example, I can model most of an operating room in Revit, bring it into Twinmotion, and use highly detailed content from 3D Max or Turbosquid within the same scene. I can also add moving and animated objects to my VR scenes...
Exciting... I know.
Unfortunately, Twinmotion 2020, as tested, underwhelmed a bit with VR.
I would say the quality of the image (shadows, reflections, and lighting) was on par to my Enscape3D scenes in the HTC Vive.
You also have the ability to modify materials within the headset, jump to locations, and even change the weather.
But, the only way to move is using the trigger/teleport. Sure, you can actually walk in the real world and it will recognize it, but making users teleport only (as opposed to using the d-pad and walking when needed) is a limitation.
Presenter Mode
Twinmotion changed their scene exporting options from 2019 to 2020. In 2019, they used a tool called "BIM Motion". In 2020, they use a tool called "Presenter".
Both tools give you the ability to export an entire scene and create an executable file that can be run on any machine (well, any machine with a graphics card at least...).
BIM Motion was cool in that it was simple and gave you access to camera views and phases.
Presenter is cool in that you can combine images and videos to create a "presentation". Literally, you can make a real-time rendered slide deck. You also have the ability to modify each scene to be fully interactive or not. Pretty cool.
So, why file this under "things that can be improved"?
First, as cool as the new Presenter is, for some reason they got rid of the ability to access phasing with it. So you are now beholden to the camera view you choose for the phasing. Not a major deal, but it is if you want to cruise around a model and flip through phasing with a client and not have to jump back to the original camera location every time you do.
Second, and this is for both 2019 and 2020, I wish transitions between scenes were animated. This is something I will give major credit to Enscape3D on. They have an awesome way of moving between scenes.
I spoke with the developers and they did have a good reason for not animating between scenes. If you have one camera that has a bunch of different settings than another camera the transition would end up being a "movie" that has to calculate the setting changes...
Well, either way, it would be cool if it did....
My Conclusion
For you, Twinmotion 2020 is worth a try. I won't be going out on a limb by saying I know you will be impressed and also have fun with it.
For me, will I be dumping Lumion for Twinmotion...?
Stay tuned to find out...
Click here to download and try out Twinmotion 2020 today...
Want to learn more about bringing your Revit models into Twinmotion??
From Revit to Twinmotion: A Free Mini-Course
Learn how to create beautiful images, animations, & real-time environments with your Revit models...
In this free five step mini-course I will walk you through everything you need to know to bring your Revit models into Twinmotion 2020 including:
- Exporting and Importing your Revit Models (& best practices).
-Applying Materials (with tips and tricks for more realism!).
- Building a Twinmotion world around your Revit models.
- Exterior and Interior Renderings
- Animations and Videos (with an Urban Scene context).
