pic Games releases Twinmotion 2020.2

Epic Games has released Twinmotion 2020.2, the latest version of tis Unreal-Engine-based real-time visualisation software, adding a range of new tools for creating architectural animations.

The update also improves the visual quality of the software’s water and car paint materials, and adds new readymade tree, construction vehicle and aircraft models.

An easy-to-use tool for visualising CAD data

Created by French visualisation studio KA-RA, Twinmotion was desgned to enable architects with limited 3D experience to create still or animated visualisations of their buildings.

It imports hero models in a range of standard 3D file formats, or via live linnks to CAD applications. Users can then create background environments from a library of stock assets, and assign lights.

Atmospheric properties – including clouds, rain and snow, and ambient lighting based on geographical location and time of day – can be adjusted via slider-based controls.

The software was acquired by Epic in 2019, and initially made available for free, before being re-released commercially earlier this year with an aggressive new price point.

New in Twinmotion 2020.2: neat parametric door system, new animation features

Twinmotion 2020.2 extends the software’s animation capabilities, adding a range of features intended to enable users to create animation semi-automatically.

That includes a new system of interactive parametric doors: as well as snapping and scaling automatically to openings in walls, the doors open automatically when characters or the scene camera move nearby.

Users can also now manually link any scene object to a rotation or translation widget in order to create simple animations like doors and windows opening or shutting.

In addition, the release adds a new a new multi-track timeline-based Phasing tool, intended for animating the construction schedule of a building, or presenting variant designs.

Improvements to the water and car paint materials

The update also improves the visual quality of the water that Twinmotion generates: both for bodies of water like rivers and lakes, and of puddles on hard surfaces.

The material used for the stock vehicle models provided with the software gets a clear coat layer to mimic the behaviour of real-world car paint more accurately.

New stock 3D vehicle and vegetation models

New stock assets include a set of “smart aircraft” with customisable colours and airline logos. They react to time of day, automatically turning on lights at night.

The release also adds 15 new East Asian tree species, each with four seasonal and three age states; and updates “several” of the existing construction vehicles.

Pricing and system requirements

Twinmotion is available for Windows 7+ and macOS 10.13.6+. Integration plugins are available for ArchiCAD, SketchUp Pro, Revit, Rhino and RikCAD.

The update is free to registered users of Twinmotion 2020.1. New licences have an MSRP of $499.

Here is the trailer for Twinmotion 2020.2:

by Jim Thacker