The fast rendering and presentation tool for AEC finds a much wider audience as Epic enhances Twinmotion. In 2022, Twinmotion gets tons of new content, new rendering options, and more help from the cloud.

It’s been a while since we’ve reported on Twinmotion, and as a result, there’s plenty to talk about. In the give-it-to-me-now world we live in, it may have seemed as if Epic was moving slowly in the process of integrating Twinmotion since it was acquired in 2019. But, coming back to it now, three short years later, we see that Epic’s Unreal team has transformed Twinmotion and has made it a full member of the Unreal ecosystem with talents beyond the AEC industry. As in all things 3D this year, and last, the watchword is metaverse. We wouldn’t call Twinmotion a true metaverse environment but at the rate it is rapidly gaining new capabilities, it seems likely it will find a role in that marketplace, especially as the world figures out what exactly metaverse means.

Twinmotion was originally designed by Abvent as a focused rendering and presentation tool for architects. It enabled fast presentation visualizations of projects. With this release, Twinmotion 2022.2 retains its ease of use but gains many more skills.

We should say, by the way, that last year’s series of updates accomplished much of the heavy lifting that went into transforming Twinmotion into a true Unreal tool. That is when Twinmotion become fully integrated into Unreal’s Datasmith transport tools, which allows models to be brought into Unreal from other 3D content creation tools such as Revit, Catia, Graphisoft, Cinema 4D, etc. A list of the tools supported by Datasmith is included on the Epic site, here.

With the 2021 release, Twinmotion also got access to Epic’s Quixel megascans content, lighting enhancements, additional stylistic options for non-photoreal looks, and access to a cloud version of Twinmotion for collaboration and rendering boosts from GPUs in the cloud.

In 2022, new cloud features enable more complex presentations by increasing the limits on RAM and VRAM. Support for motion sensors mean users accessing presentations and panorama sets on mobile devices and tablets can look around the scene by moving their device. The update will also enable users to embed presentations or panorama sets in external websites. More details on that feature are available on the Unreal Engine documentation page.

The new 2022.2 version adds the ability to render images and videos at very high resolutions (up to 64K), and a new HDRI backdrop feature. In 2021, Epic also added Sketchfab to its content stable and now Twinmotion has access to over 660,000 free 3D models as well as hundreds of new native assets.

The ongoing work to increase productivity, interoperability, and performance includes the ability to create groups of multiple objects and save them for reuse. Shortcuts are being improved to fit in with more standard usage models. And it is now easier to work with small scale objects in Twinmotion 2022, which improves its applicability in industrial design applications as well as AEC.  For a more detailed description of the new features, have a look at the Twinmotion 2022.2 release notes.

This upgrade is free to existing users and can be installed from the Epic Games launcher.

As spelled out on the Twinmotion pricing page,  there are free versions for tryout and education. A perpetual commercial license is $499.