I have been using Twin Motion for architectural rendering recently, and I’ve been convinced to the point where I don’t see why I would use anything else in the future. Speed, quality, the material and object libraries, the ease of use, zero learning curve, animated environments, all of this makes traditional rendering software completely obsolete in my experience.
I’ve just presented my thesis project at the university, even the teachers were blown away, and it took like 20 minutes to create and export all the images. Last time it took two days to do the same with V-Ray.
What’s everybody’s take on this, am I judging too early? Is there some aspect of professional rendering where it can’t compete? What are the downsides I should know about?
I’m genuinely curious what you guy think about this.
Hi! I prefer Enscape, because it is embedded into Rhino, and has very good assets, too. I shy away from exporting into any standalone software for rendering, because this is a one way ticket, materials and assets have to be done there and stay there.
I like to see viewport proxies of the assets, and sometimes even use their proxy version for abstract/graphical renderings.
My 2c
I think both Twinmotion and Enscape are going to dominate market share in the next few years. due to their ease and speed I’m just worried that all rendering in 2030 will look exactly the same.
You’re right, I’ll rephrase. The learning curve is such that you can get amazing results with very little practice, because so much is already pre-programmed and optimized. I guess later you can also dive very deep into it, but most of us just don’t have to.
The renderings have a certain look and feel, yes. Which is in our case ok because we just use them internally mostly - for other professionals. If we would need them for PR or maybe a competition, handing them over to a render studio makes sense. However, with some tweaking a more high-endish look could also be possible with those realtime renderers. There’s some room for experimentation.
However, it’s a joy to get a 4k rendering in 7seconds. Don’t want to do without any more.
(Using a render farm could be a solution, but yeah)
Personally I think Twinmotion is fantastic for some things, but Twinmotion doesn’t replace high-end visualisation, it just provides an entry level tool for those that need renders but don’t have the time/money/need for fancy renders. Same applies to Enscape and Lumion. Personally I think Twinmotion doesn’t look that great, you get a very fake-plastically look to the renders, but given the time and effort its a great output (especially compared to what we use to have).
Where I am interested is using Unreal Engine (with Rhino.Inside). Especially given the early release of UE5 where we can see real-time lighting… the difference in quality between UE and Twinmotion is just miles apart. I don’t think the learning curve is that difficult for UE (it isn’t just “drag and drop” like Twinmotion is), but still requires someone to invest time learning the basics. You can definitely make the argument that designers that aren’t in the VFX space might not need to know how texturing, materials and lighting work, but then again you can get some fantastic results if you do… there’s also Unity and other VXF/Rendering tools as well, like Blender, which are all great. If you know how to use one you probably could pick-up the others quickly.
There’s also the Twinmotion to UE4 bridge that came out recently, which in theory allows you to set up the scene / assets / etc. in Twinmotion and then export the whole thing to Unreal Engine for fine-tuning.
I wanted to use it on a couple scenes to see how well it works but they were all waaaaay too large (we work on large scale urban models, larger than 1GB Twinmotion files), so I can’t say how well it actually works.
Will have to check it out; I do think its cumbersome to get setup Twinmotion scenes, so would prefer going straight from Rhino to UE (or probably something like Rhino > Blender > UE if I was doing something arch-viz related).
I do think its great seeing the interoperability of these tools increasing though…
Twinmotion is very great in animation, but my take is that the quality of still renders is very low, no mtter how you increased the resolutions or the refinement… it is still not crisp enough like what vray indroduce… I still can’f find a solution to render high quality still image in a short time.
also the seconed take is the model librry you add, I wanna integrate my own asset, takes too much time too match a new asset with good materials too.
I usually use lumion but I am familiar with twin motion, in terms of UI twin motion is superior but in terms of render quality it has a lot to catch up with lumion or even enscape. The most promising part about twin motion is the fact that it is owned by epic games and they have a lot of plans for it. Right now you can start a project in twin motion and finish it in the unreal engine but it is not a streamlined process.
I have been pretty happy with the results I have had using Twin Motion. But to go further with Unreal Engine is a whole next challenge due to the game engine default templates. I may have reached the ‘can’t teach an old dog new tricks’ point…
I think it is appropriate to reopen this question in a few months or even next year.
I agree with everything you just said.
The software is awesome, easy with a library and impressive rendering.
The cofiguration is limiting, the rendering of Mmde X has the same atmosphere as the rendering of Mr Y.
I regularly test TwinMotion and each time I reject its use.
From a development perspective, Epic has just acquired TwinMotion.
Look at the roadmap to understand that TwinMotion is not yet finalized.
But some features currently in beta are very promising.
And if we are to believe the announcement made by EpicGame on UnrealEngine 5, we should be able to use UE without the specific constraints of optimizing video game platforms. No more worries about UV channels for lightmaps and no need to wait 10min for the machine to precompute the light each time the scene is modified. With Lumen.
(Don’t tell me about EU Ray-Tracing. If you’ve used it, you know that taking the time to import your model into the EU and the performance of Ray-Tracing EU provides little more benefit than other Ray-Tracing rendering software.)
When all this is finalized, it is possible that the Rhino->(TwinMotion->EU)->Image/Video workflow will be really simplified.
NB. I just saw for a moment that the version is now accessible.
Hi, I tried Enscape and found no way to set views. I found it disappointing that I could not use my saved views from Rhino just like I would do with Vray. Might ir be just a limitation of the trial version?
Should be possible… Did you check this binocular icon (left in the floating Enscape window toolbar)? All Rhino named views are listed there.
Btw. these can be connected with saved visual settings since 3.0. Quite handy. Open visual settings (top right somewhere), there’s a slim bar on the left edge of the window (easy to miss) which can be folded out. Create as many different settings as you like, then go back to the view list, click on the icon next to a view and choose a visual setting. Don’t forget to press save there.
I’ve been trying Twinmotion with Rhino about every 6 months for the last 2 years, whenever there’s an update to TM. I’ve had no luck using it for more than a day before it quits. Usually quits while I’m trying to resynchronize between TM and Rhino after updating some geometry.
I also think the help site for Twinmotion is terrible. Try finding any information about settings for the TM rhino plug-in.
For their user forums they’ve chosen some weird home-brew thing that’s kind of like a newsfeed?
I’m finding these replies very interesting. In my experience, neither Twinmotion or Enscape come even remotely close to Lumion in terms of quality. Unfortunately, Lumion has a terribly annoying interface.
Unreal Engine and the like are without a doubt the future, but I’m surprised by the comment that the learning curve isn’t too steep. Myself, and friends smarter than me, have consistently struggled to do fairly basic tasks - perhaps there is some fundamental insight we’re missing.
I haven’t used Twinmotion, however I believe the ability to export to UE5 is the way to go. Compared to lumion, there is noticeable differences; lumion just seems to produce better realistic scenes. Enscape just has a long way to go in terms of offering higher end renders. I’m a fan of Lumion due to its ease of interoperability procedure and addition of variation control to test out different design options while giving an acceptable level of render quality. I’d jump into UE5 if they nail the interoperability as it would produce the level of render quality as I would want. Speed has always been the biggest factor when doing design itterations.
I have been testing UE5 since yesterday. They didn’t lie. We can put millions of polygons in the scene and it’s as difficult as using Rhino’s _RenderedViewport command.
I remain objective, but I must admit that we have just made a technological leap. Today we can do things that were unthinkable last week.
They forgot to say something. Lumen (UE5) does not understand the alpha channel of textures. It handles translucent materials but not if they are partially masked using a texture.
So … All the vegetation …
Yes! It’s crazy. It seems that with an RTX you can compensate for this lack, I don’t have one so I don’t know.
I don’t know if they will solve this, I think I understood that they will not.
EU5 will be released as a stable version within a year and is clearly indicated for very modern and future PCs.
By then, the TwinMotion integration can be completed.
In any case, it remains impressive.
