Twinmotion. Is this the end of archviz?
While many of us are still focusing on render engines like VRay, Corona, Arnold, etc. to make high end visuals for clients, we are looking for innovative tools that will change the whole industry. We are now entering an age where Real-Time technologies are getting better visually and easier to use. Twinmotion is one of them.
Twinmotion is a visualization tool based on Unreal, one of the most powerful game engines. In fact, Epic Games, the studio behind the engine, has been so impressed by the tool that they acquired it in May 2019 while still being in its beta phase. The tool has now been released on the Epic game store and is currently free to use.
Easy to use is the key here. With its user friendly interface, it provides a really fast learning curve. It also has plugins for Archicad, Revit and Sketchup to create a fast and efficient link between architects and artists. When you start a new project, a skybox with a background city is already there to situate the project. If your project is located far from cities, no worries, there is always a way to change the background with mountains, fields or smaller cities. Twinmotion has a wide array of assets for interior and exterior scenes to quickly enhance your visual. You want some movement in your scene? No problem, add groups of people, vehicles, boats or even aircrafts with predefined paths to add some life and enhance the impact and realism of your work.
Let’s not forget about the lighting and weather system. With a full day and night cycle, you can obtain the mood you want with the exact sun position based on your chosen localization. With a simple slider, you can switch between all four seasons and different weather conditions. All the library assets from Twinmotion are linked with weather conditions and seasons, so you have an instant look at all the conditions and can even create animations between all of them.
To sum it up, this new piece of software is here to stay and remind us of the big shift to Real-Time solutions our industry will face in the coming years. Unreal just introduced Real-Time Ray tracing technology with the help of the new Nvidia RTX GPUs, so it’s not unlikely we’ll see it appear in Twinmotion in some time since it’s based on the same engine…
So, does this mean the end of Architectural Visualisation services as we know it? No, it is the natural evolution of all industries, the disruption that technology can bring to every market. We see it as the 2.0 of architectural visualisation, something we have been waiting for quite some time now.
As TwinMotion empowers architects to tell their story through their design, our responsibility is to support this transition and position ourselves in a completely new light, instead of being the service supplier for architects and real estate developers we as well need to reinvent ourselves as collaborators and facilitators of the following steps within Architectural Visualisation.
Is the Art Architectural Visualisation DEAD? To the contrary, it is very much alive, we are at the brink of a new era. If you need any more information on the subject, we at Nanopixel are happy to inform you and help you with the possibilities of Twinmotion.
