One of the most important developments in enterprise settings, including AEC firms as well as professionals like urban planners and facility managers, has been the adoption of game engines for rendering 3D visualizations. It’s always been preferable to work in 3D as much as possible since that’s how we naturally perceive the world, but rendering models of all scales in three dimensions was easier said than done. Game engines helped unlock that problem for a lot of industries, as we’ve recently discussed.
Epic Games is one of the companies, along with Unity, whose game engine has fueled this development across industries, largely driven by their Twinmotion offering. Twinmotion is their real-time 3D rendering software used by a number of different professionals, including from industries like entertainment, manufacturing, and of course AEC. On that latter point, a couple of years ago they announced a key integration with Autodesk Revit to better serve that industry. More recently, the company announced the release of the newest version of Twinmotion, version 2024.1.
This newest version of the software includes a number of new features and improvements to existing ones addressing needs from all different industries. Twinmotion wrote a blog running through some of the improvements here, but there are a few worth calling out for our purposes that would serve those in the AEC and other adjacent industries.
In what would seem like a relatively minor addition, Twinmotion now allows for users to apply smart effects for imported foliage assets. The software already allowed for “smart effects” on a number of different trees and shrubs in their own library, automatically applying effects from things like wind, seasons affecting leaf color, leaf loss, and snow accumulation. Now, that can be applied to assets imported into the software with the new Foliage master material.
They wrote in the aforementioned blog, “The material comes with a choice of gradients for both color change and leaf loss across the year, supporting a wide range of tree species. Separate materials can be applied to foliage, blossoms, and fruit, giving full control over the coloring and timing of these elements.”
It’s also worth pointing to the improvements in other key areas of these workflows. One example is with fabric rendering in a scene, with new capabilities allowing for a wider range of textiles that can be simulated at a higher fidelity within a model. Twinmotion has also improved the ability of users to “paint” assets into a scene, simplifying the process to populate defined paths or areas within a scene. They also add they it can be done “with just the degree of randomness you need to make it look totally natural or constrained to a greater or lesser degree.”
There’s plenty more included within this release and it’s worth reading through the entire blog posted above for more of a rundown of these features, but overall there are clear themes. Among those, the most that stands out from the perspective of needs within the AEC industry is that this release really focuses on the details of model creation and simulation capabilities.
On their face, most of these improvements and additions seem minor, but it’s these minor details that will often create the most ROI. There is a base level of detail that nearly every professional – be it an architect, or a facility manager, or an urban planner – will achieve, but getting to that extra level can mean be all the difference. For some professionals, that means winning bids over competitors who may not boast the same level of detail, and for others it might just mean more realistic simulations leading to more informed decisions. Whatever it may be, those small details don’t seem so small when trying to create the perfect and most realistic visualization possible.
Find the full release notes for Twinmotion 2024.1 here.
