D5 vs Twinmotion vs Unreal Engine?

I’m using both D5 and Twinmotion. Twinmotion has been a struggle but I’m just getting over the steep initial learning curve (for me at least). The UI feels like a scattered mess. Did it get re-designed? It’s completely free and has a lot of good features so I really want to make it work for me.

D5 feels like they’ve tried really hard to offer a good compatibility bridge between itself and Rhino.

A quick example is the texture mapping. It comes into D5 almost perfectly:

(while typing this, I’m about to open Twinmotion and compare, and it’s forcing an update on me. So hopefully I don’t close this window haha).

Here’s the same end table in Twinmotion:

I can make it look better but I can’t fix it completely (not yet at least). A few of these little chores on their own aren’t bad, but they add-up after a while. When I do have to fix textures in D5 it only takes a second (usually the “Tri-planar” button and adjusting the scale a bit).

I’m really motivated to make Twinmotion work for me. It’s very generous that they’ve provided it for free. I’m wondering however after watching a few videos: What is the jump like from Twinmotion to Unreal Engine (EU)? Does UE run smoother since you ditch the Twinmotion layer? If I have to spend time on things like texture mapping am I really saving time with Twinmotion?

Right now I’m finding that D5 is an excellent way to get decent looking renders with a fast turn-around. D5 does however have ceilings in various places. I really appreciate that they’ve put effort into making D5 very friendly to Rhino imports.
Maybe I just haven’t found it yet but D5 seems to lack a high-powered ray-tracer/path-tracer (non-real-time) rendering engine. Maybe there’s just a button somewhere. Right now my renders look exactly like the real-time one’s, which are okay but I wonder if I can get up an extra level.
D5 has a lot of AI features. I really want to learn how to make custom textures (I think you can do that?). AI works great for creating variance (similar to the “grunge” feature in Twinmotion). Right now the AI can add a level of realism but it will also change your doors at random… to really weird doors. I see the real usefulness here being that the AI could make, say, a pattern that’s obviously repeating look like it isn’t repeating; basically just the small tweaks I guess.

Twinmotion on the other hand has so many features, and for free! If I can figure out the texture mapping I think I’m going to be in business.
I find the whole interface extremely unintuitive. I’ve been chalking this up to age but I’m realizing it’s not me… sort of: Mastering modern GUI’s is really a memory game. Completely different approaches are used in different places. And a lot of the icons don’t really infer their actual purpose well. Once you memorize everything it’s pretty fluid, so as long as they leave well-enough alone (I think they’ve overhauled the GUI at some point?) I think it will be just fine. For me at least it took a bit of extra time to adjust.

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did u say unreal engine :face_holding_back_tears: :beers:

I don’t have any experience with D5, but it seems pathtracing isn’t a feature that has been implemented yet. I’ve dabbled with Unreal, but I found it a lot more complex than Twinmotion. Fixing textures in TM is something I have to do as well, but it is mostly a matter of playing with the UV settings for the material, see attached image. My hope is that the interface for TM will improve, there are too many nested commands that should be accessible via a right mouse click.

Is there something in particular that D5 is offering for your renders that Rhino Cycles cannot for the moment? I am curious.

Also, I would second @Czaja opinion regarding bella. It is certainly worth a try for the excellent integration and support for the users.

Though bella remains CPU based the time being, for renders such as this, I reckon it is certainly worth the extra time over even GPU. I bet you could get something very usable in minutes with bella if rendering woodwork and tables is your bread and butter.

Do you have a “final quality” render image + object 3dm that you can share here? I’d be curious to see what Cycles and bella can get out of your requirements if you are happy.

There’s a few things. Feature-wise: The grass in D5 is pretty cool and very close to being realistic. It’s also hard to get (useable) models into Rhino to fill out a scene. D5 provides a lot of content although it’s usually a little out of the scope of stuff I actually need. And Twinmotion has live connections to at least one huge model library.

And with regards to abilities: I’m having trouble with lights and transparency with cycles. It seems I have to use extreme settings (typically very small numbers) and it compromises my level of control. When I get it right it looks good but it’s SO hard to get it right. There’s a few people on here doing amazing renders with cycles but I’m of the strong opinion that they are quite up there talent wise. Relevant to myself is more what a mere mortal can do because I am one :wink: .

Cycles is also a little glitchy. Some of which is due to my system being taxed pretty hard while running it (but that’s understandable). Sometimes I have stuff like lights turning off on me, or textures going funny. The scale of procedural textures seems to change when going from “rendered” to “raytraced” modes, meaning I basically can’t even use it. If my procedural materials maintained their appearance (or even just close to it) that would be a huge win.

Now all the above applies to “larger objects” (as defined by Rhino’s template descriptors). For small stuff I’m able to get pretty good looking renders for cycles. With an HRDI, maybe one or two lights, and a basic backdrop things look pretty good. But for an architectural scene I’m just ending up with crap or spending way too much time.

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Hi Keith,

Looks like D5 is doing an easier job.

Unreal is it’s own beast, there is a huge learning curve getting it to work, it’s the opposite of Twinmotion.

Loading a file and working it is not like other programs. There is no “save as” in Unreal. Projects become huge and take a while to open. It’s geared for teams of people so it’s all about local directories. Remember it’s a game development platform.

Rendering in general might seem hard because you can’t just hit a render button you have to create a sequence then add a camera and other actors then you can render.
Rendering demands scripts to access it’s deeper features.
Textures have to be blueprinted or edited in GH like nodes which can be really difficult for beginners. However what one can do is really incredible but some stuff like adding a video sequence has tons of steps where you have to make sure your sequence is in the folder of your project. When creating textures you have to copy the master texture first then work on the copy not the master. This goes for many objects as well.

Lighting can be troublesome if you don’t know the plethora of features. Like do you raytrace or use lumen? You have to “build” your lighting most of the time before you can render.

Nanite geometry might cause a few bugs or conflict with lumen.

Blueprints as they are called and levels take getting used to.

You can’t import or export that easily you have to create folders and then import or export.

I found there are so many many options that you have to use tutorials constantly to get over the roadblocks.

Cameras are really incredible and they have all the things like a real camera so it’s wonderful to work with unreal cameras.

But if you stick with it it’s an awesome wonderful program and has tons of deep features. I use Unreal for animation and it’s killer for that. Again it’s a learning curver to get things to work properly. I use it because its really a fast and robust rendering platform. Twin is also great for rendering I like it’s ease of use and it’s speed is something Rhino can’t come close to. I use it mainly for stills for clients because it’s so fast with great results. I can’t use Rhino because it’s too slow for rendering anything that takes over a minute to render is an animation time killer for me. Also twin has great foliage and characters, vehicles etc right out of the box. Unreal has more but you have to download from the fab market place but lots of great stuff there.

Once your file is in place you can really move around in it in real time with pretty killer lighting and Fx like real time fog etc, it’s pretty mind boggling. Because in essence you have created a game even if you just want to render something.

A few years ago I exited using autodesk in favor of Unreal, Twin and yes Blender.
I really like Blender it’s totally a killer program now, great animation and fast rendering using evee. Cycles has it’s problems and is a bit slow in Blender. Blender can handle huge files just like twin or unreal and I think is more polished for animation. Blender is better than Rhino at handling huge files where I found Rhino jokes to a stand still.

RM

Thanks for going into such detail!! I don’t know where I’d find the time but I’d love to pick up a game engine: Godot or Unreal. For all practicality I think I’m best to just stick with the more user-friendly stuff. It also sounds like UE is also something you’d want a desktop for.

I’m not doing animations at the moment. My 4070 laptop punches above it’s weight (kind of not really… it was a good buy at least). Cycles speed isn’t an issue… yet… but my scenes are pretty simple.

I agree! I think in the last year or two it’s really gained momentum. I did not adapt to the GUI very well at all. It’s too mixed up: Right click here, keystroke there… it’s similar to Twinmotion but worse because it’s a more complex GUI. I might have another crack at it however because as with Twinmotion it’s just a matter of time.

Unreal engine to render Rhino models sounds interesting

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I looked at twinmotion user interface and reminds me alot of keyshot

I read its free but is it limited in features?

Twinmotion’s free version is apparently fully-functional minus the “cloud” service (which might be a pretty good deal).

While I’m here I’d like to ask: Do you guys upgrade to the latest and greatest or stick with a specific version of Twinmotion?

Newer is better but system requirements keep climbing of course. sometimes I wonder what I could do with Flamingo. It didn’t look all that bad!

I will try and render some stuff the direct link plugin for Rhino is a nice touch

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I agree with these comments. The transparency control on objects seems highly irregular, and the handling of the extrems seems to be highly non-linear.

Regarding the lights, I also agree there is a problem. For me it is normally that the lighting either doesn’t respond (Render queue update failure), or that the lighting randomly decides to follow a different normalisation, and the entire scene either dims or gets brighter. This adds into the problem that the attenuation of light in Cycles seems rather odd; and it treats transparent surfaces as if they have fixed intervals of transparency sometimes.

The constant “preparing PBR for first use” issue is vexing quite a lot of the time.

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I’m not for or against anything, but why has Enscape not been mentioned? I feel it should be part of this discussion.

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By all means mention it!

I’ve used it and when I did it was the “best”. Just expensive. Everything seemed a lot easier. There was some stuff I could do in Twinmotion (and D5 for that matter) that I don’t think I could do in Enscape but in general, if I ignore cost it seemed like the best real-time render engine. If someone else is paying for my license I might get back into it.

Aside from the cost it also took them a while to make it compatible with Rhino 8.

The thing is though: If they are charging people what they are they have to keep up development.

I don’t normally post but I thought I might be able to answer some of your questions (and probably create new ones!).

I have been using Unreal engine for the past 8 months, when I was looking for a free renderer that I could use with Rhino; I also tried Twinmotion for my past 2 projects, since they have made it free now.

Unreal Engine (version 5 in this case):

  • complicated to use and different from the typical render engine (it is a game engine)
  • easy to do things that apparently break something
  • lots of ways to do the same thing
  • slow interface (this might be me haha) but there are ways to reduce the overhead and make it faster when modelling your scene
  • plenty of tutorials, so you are almost guarantee that your ‘problem’ might have already been solved by someone else
  • the renderer gives great results once you know how lumen/nanite/shadows works; otherwise it will give ‘ok’ results
  • i find it (interface especially) faster than Twinmotion
  • very powerful camera settings/controls
  • animation features are great (also plenty of plug ins)
  • materials can be complex or simple as you like, and after the initial hurdle are rather easy to understand how they works (keep in mind that I have more of a programmer mind than an artist one, so that might influence this)

Now the Twinmotion impressions:

  • easy to learn (especially compared to Unreal!)
  • gives quick results
  • renderer gives good results
  • most actions are ‘drag and drop’
  • very good base materials and libraries of objects (i use them for staging renders)
  • it seems to be difficult (for me) to break something
  • project sizes are smaller than Unreal (where a simple project can be a 1.5 GB on disk)
  • lots of tutorials on Youtube
    I personally prefer Unreal engine; I find it faster and gives me good results. The interface I find it slightly faster than Twinmotion (where even at the medium settings kind of ‘chug along’ on a Quadro p4000).
    I also find it a lot easier to handle UVs in Unreal, where you have a dedicated (even though simple) UV editor; Twinkotion has some UV controls but are more basic. With Unreal you can seam, repack, resize etc. I find that in both it is better to set-up the UVs before importing, but with Unreal I can get good results if Datasmith doesn’t import properly (and it happens that some UVs get messed up in the process).
    Both programs import from Rhino very well using Datasmith; I find it easier to assign ‘bogus’ materials in Rhino just to get some kind of visual representation, then assign everything properly in Unreal/Twinmotion, rather than importing without the materials.
    If you find that the light ‘bleeds’ through the surfaces it is because both need surfaces to be joined properly and have thicknesses, usually around 4cm.
    The Unreal learning curve is high: it took me from knowing exactly zero, to where I am now around 4 months of ‘non continuous’ usage.
    With both (Unreal and Twinmotion) you will definitely have to learn the tricks of how to use lights, otherwise the scenes will look blurry, with shadows that look like they have been ‘down sampled’ with lots of pixelation that is normal and can be improved in the settings. Again, because of the quantity of controls we have in Unreal, I always find a way to improve this aspect, where in Twinmotion sometimes I can still get blurry corners (again, this might be me).

I could post some images (nothing grand so not sure if they would even be helpful to you) of a couple of projects, if I get permission from the owners.

My machine is an ancient fx 8350 with 32 gb of ram and a Quadro p4000 (8 gb) just to give you a way to possibly compare performance.

Either way, good luck for your journey; mine has been funny (even though my office walls have learnt some colourful expressions along the way…) even with the challenges.

@keithscadservices
I checked the cost of Enscape and it was about 500€ per year. So yeah, compared to free, it’s much.

I’ve used (in my history) Mental Ray, V-ray (1-2,4-7), Maxwell, Twinmotion, Enscape. Also tested others. As an architect, the renders are not the main focus, but just a medium to get the design intent communicated. Used Twinmotion a few years ago as a test, but the quality was too crappy then for anything other than wide area shots (or I didn’t know how to use it properly).

And in the past two years or so, I shifted first to Vray (with RTX render), because it was super fast - like <10min to final picture. Good assets and quality. But have to say that after embracing Enscape, I can get a set of 4-5 renders plus an animation made in half a days work. The quality is more than enough for presenting ideas. Not marketing quality, but wouldn’t be too ashamed to show them either.

I have to say (and I hate marketing speech) that Enscape has bought me a lot of time. I don’t have to reserve much resources for renders, but they can almost be done as an afterthought. A big factor in that are the adequate asset libraries.

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A few years ago, I also used Enscape in parallel with V-Ray for a while because I was impressed by the integration in Rhino, the speed and the quality of the renderings. But unfortunately I kept reaching limits with the materials and V-Ray Cosmos also provided me with extensive assets to fill scenes.

At some point, I was so annoyed that my customers suddenly turned up during a project with material requests that couldn’t be realized with Enscape that I gave up in frustration. With multiple graphics cards and GPU rendering, V-Ray is the safe option for still renderings. I just wish I could calculate an animation faster with V-Ray and Bongo.

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I had to go look because that doesn’t sound so bad. I had remembered it being quite expensive.

And I found it: The killer for me is the monthly cost. I probably won’t use it every month of a given year (I doubt it) so I need to do one month at a time. The monthly cost almost doubles the price of Enscape.

Yes. This also is the case for Vray, which also went into the subscription only model last year, or 2023?.

You will own nothing and be happy. Shame really, as I was about to purchase Vray, and ended up two days late by the time I had decided. It had already had the perpetual licenses removed.

When Vantage got spun off from the Vray solo(?) or whatever it was, that killed it for me, as I certainly don’t want to pay £80 per month for any renderer package. It is utterly impractical for many amateur users I’d imagine, merely because of the cost.

Chaos Cosmos is excellent though, and seeing the sheer speed of Vantage DXR implementation is always mind blowing when it is setup correctly. In addition, it also has prototype functionality for Intel Arc discrete GPUs, which is also great if you are on a mobile solution with that, or even Desktop.