CU1911

SOFTWARE focus
Unreal designs
Epic Games' Unreal Engine gives Twinmotion its ability to handle rendering on the fly
Instead of berating your children about
the amount of time they spend playing
Fortnite and other games with
awesome animations and rendering,
consider how much the software used to
create them is transforming our own
industry. It's no coincidence either, as this
summer Twinmotion became part of Epic
Games, well known as the developer of
both Fortnite and the real-time creation
tool Unreal Engine. Twinmotion is already
powered by Unreal Engine and was the
subject of a recent Epic Games webinar
called Fast architectural visualisation.
Real-time rendering allows architects to
create their designs and view them
instantly fully rendered, and then to edit
the design and see the changes updated
in real-time. It also enables animations
and panoramas to be created in minutes
instead of days, and plays a crucial role
in creating virtual reality immersive
experiences. Twinmotion is already
regarded as one the better visualisation
and rendering tools for architects and
designers because of its simplicity of
use, which doesn't compromise on its
quality of output. It runs on both PCs and
Macs and allows users to create stills,
animations and immersive media
experiences from CAD models.
Once you have created your design -
either in ARCHICAD, Revit, SketchUp
Pro, or RIKCAD - you can import it and
synchronise it with Twinmotion, which
enables any changes made to the
original model to be instantly updated in
your visualisations. Twinmotion comes
with a large library of materials and other
assets. Selecting one of the PBR
(physically based rendering) materials or
lights and dragging and dropping them
into the model, together with their
attributes - for example, the reflective
characteristics of different materials or
the luminescence of a light - adds
veracity to the model. The Twinmotion
library includes animated characters and
vehicles, enabling you to populate
scenes with moving characters, or to
describe a path for a vehicle to follow in
an animated scene.
Once the date and time of the original
scene is set, you can change the
seasons, and go from daytime to
nighttime using a slider bar. Additional
slider bars give you control over the
weather, wind and precipitation, including
leaf fall in the autumn and snow in winter.
Pinning the model's location and
orientation will also provide an accurate
representation of shadows throughout
the day.
The main advantage of Twinmotion,
though, is the speed of Unreal Engine; its
powerful processing capabilities lie
behind its ability to produce rendering in
real-time, and not just for the
photorealistic rendering of preset scenes,
but also its ability to provide immersive
experiences, where users are able to
navigate through buildings using
Twinmotion, or the virtual reality
capabilities in BIMmotion, which give
users the ability to run Twinmotion
visualisations without having to install it
on their system, and to create 360
degree videos and panoramas.
In fact, the speed of Unreal Engine
enables users to achieve great results in
timescales that would simply not be
possible using other tools. This includes
adding animated people to a scene in
just a couple of clicks or populating an
entire forest of different tree species,
randomly positioned using painting and
sculpting tools.
18
November/December 2019