Twinmotion 2022.2
As a result of Epic Games’ acquisition of Twinmotion in 2019 we are now seeing their fingerprints all over it. The clearest example of this is that they are considering a future integration of Metahuman, which was launched by Epic Games this past year. Overall development has been focused on its positioning in the broader visualisation pipeline with BIM preceding it and Unreal Engine coming after it.
One of the main strengths of Twinmotion is its dragand-drop
asset library. This enables creators to populate their scenes with photorealistic assets without needing the skills or having the time to model them from scratch. As you can imagine, this is also a big timesaver. So, how has Twinmotion upped its game in this area recently? We’ve seen a transition to assets being released on the cloud on a monthly basis, which means the number of new assets available to artists is not only greater, but new options are more regularly available.
Considerations around this are particularly important for applications that utilise off-the-shelf assets. It can reduce levels of creativity and will, over time, result in a loss of modelling skill across the industry, but more pertinent to our discussion are the risks associated with using premade assets.
The most notable of these is that your work can quickly begin to look like the work of other artists. Scenes become formulaic and predictable. By releasing a substantial number of new assets every month, Twinmotion is giving artists a huge plethora of models that greatly reduces
the chance of two scenes looking the same. To put some numbers to these comments, since version one of the 2022 release, Twinmotion has added 660 new assets but more impressively, its integration with Sketchfab has resulted in a whopping 660,000 additional assets, all free of charge.
Alongside these preset models, Twinmotion has made some improvements to how scenes are displayed, specifically in relation to rendering and High Dynamic Range Image (HDRI) backdrops. With architects being one of its key target markets, it comes as no surprise to see that artists can now render at up to 64K resolution. This will be ideal for billboards and large displays but comes with the warning that your hardware will need to be able to handle the resulting large file sizes.
It is also possible to use HDRIS when lighting scenes. This further increases the level of realism that is achievable because real-world lighting data is utilised for calculating results. Twinmotion has included hundreds of HDRIS, so the setup couldn’t be any more straightforward.
“THE NUMBER OF NEW ASSETS AVAILABLE TO ARTISTS IS NOT ONLY GREATER, BUT NEW OPTIONS ARE MORE REGULARLY AVAILABLE”