Hi guys, ( @albert )
is Lands Design compatible with Unreals Datasmith exporter?
We use Twin Motion for visualization and evaluation, so this would be very interesting for us.
Thanks!
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Hi, We are exploring Datasmith. We have faced some strange results in one case. We’ll get to a conclusion soon.
Hi @Holo ,
We faced some issues: Our materials in Rhino in TM are not Double-sided materials. This issue is something that must be fixed from Twinmotion team. In general, Datasmith, gives us more strange results comparing with Direct link TM plugin in Rhino. Hence, I’d recommend to use the traditional direct link of TM till they fix it.
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Ok, so datasmith needs to support some kind of setting for using two sided materials. But if that’s the only problem then it should be OK to use. We’ll test it out, thanks! (And we’ll use fbx if it doesn’t go as planned)
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Hi @Holo,
You can change this setting inside Twinmotion for each material. But this change must be done manually, and material by material.
We asked Twinmotion to automatically export Rhino materials always as Double-sided (because in Rhino, all materials are always rendered from the two sides), but they don’t want to do that. They think this will make Twinmotion slower.
If you report this issue to Epic, then maybe will try to find a solution. In the meantime, the workaround is to edit each material, manually, each time you import it from Rhino.
This is also an issue when exporting surface from Rhino (no Lands objects), and even when exporting from other applications like ArchiCAD.
Enric
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Did you have any luck bridging a Lands Design project to Twinmotion? This workflow would really crush…
No, I encountered too many bugs in lands, so I didn’t try it with datasmith. So it was back to our inhouse tools for us.
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I see👀 any plans on releasing/licensing your in-house tools?
We got better results from Direct link than Datasmith.
Hi @Holo,
Can you please email us the issues you faced to landsdesign@asuni.com
We hope to receive your feedback there, and will try to solve the bugs you have found.
Many thanks in advance,
@elham Did you see this thread?
Thanks Julian. That’s right! A couple of issues are there in that thread.
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Hi Elham,
I did, but I think both the development and the community would benefit more from an open discussion where other users too can chime in both on bug tracking, reporting of similar incidents and also workarounds. Reporting bugs are tedious and often requires examples and proofreading (and discipline to not let frustration dictate the language when on an deadline too 
)
At the moment we can’t use the tools, but are still testing out the IFC import and export. Import has the same issues as VisualArq where tolerances can result in booleans failing, and export only has a minor flaw where it fails unless another Lands command is ran first, to activate Lands for the given Rhino file. Visual Arq has this issue too.
Personally I wish you would let us buy only the IFC importer and exporter as a standalone application, but that’s another discussion. (I don’t expect you to respond to this here as this thread is about Datasmith)
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Hi @Holo,
You are right! Indeed, we are working on huge improvements in version 6. Just let us know if you have any suggestions.
Thanks,
Hi @Holo,
Please, could you describe this issue more in detail? Some screenshots and a sample file are welcome as well, so that we can work to fix it.
This is because you need to load Lands Design before using it (if a plug-in is not loaded, you cannot use it); when you run a Lands Design command, the plug-in loads so you can use it. This is how plug-ins work in Rhino, but maybe you can set it up to load Lands Design automatically at startup: Force Rhino plugin loading at startup
I have been testing a strategy where I create new, single object plant blocks in rhino and save them to the block folder. I then replace concept block with my updated single object 3d block and place plants/trees etc. The natural variation option in the insert plant dialog yields a great organic mix of scales and heights. When I open the file in Twinmotion either through Datasmith or Direct Link. I am able to replace the variable objects with either Twinmotion plants or plants from my user library.
If you replace Landsdesign plants in Twinmotion without simplifying the block to one object, then you get redundant plants placed at each block for each object within the block.
One challenge that I have not yet figured out is how the Crown diameter and Approximate Height settings impact the size of the plant once replaced in Twinmotion. So sometimes the plants are too large or too small once replaced in TM.
This workflow could be incredible if one of the plant block representations in the landsdesign library we made of single objects and the scaling were figured out.
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Hi @julian.riise @sdjames,
Please watch this new video. We believe that now Lands Design and its objects can be synced perfectly to Twinmotion.
How to render a Lands Design model with Twinmotion - YouTube
However, we do not replace plants with those of TwinMotion since the rent plant models of Lands Design are of high quality.