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.