Twinmotion 2025.1.1, the latest release of the real time rendering software from Epic Games, supports Nvidia DLSS 4, a suite of neural rendering technologies that uses AI to boost 3D performance.

Epic Games shows that when DLSS 4 is enabled in Twinmotion it can render almost four times as many frames per second (FPS) than when DLSS is set to off.

DLSS 4 uses a technology called Multi Frame Generation, an evolution of Single Frame Generation, which was introduced in DLSS 3.

Single Frame Generation uses the AI Tensor cores on Nvidia GPUs to interpolate one synthetic frame between every two traditionally rendered frames, improving performance by reducing the number of frames that need to be rendered by the GPU.

Multi Frame Generation extends this approach by using AI to generate up to three frames between each pair of rendered frames, further increasing frame rates. The technology is only available on Nvidia’s new Blackwell-based RTX GPUs, which have been architected specifically to better support neural rendering.

Multi Frame Generation can be used alongside Super Resolution, where AI upscales a lower-resolution frame to a higher resolution, and Ray Reconstruction, where AI is used to generate additional pixel data in ray-traced scenes. According to Nvidia, when all DLSS technologies are combined, 15 out of every 16 pixels in a frame can be generated by AI. This greatly reduces the computational demands of traditional rendering and significantly boosts overall performance.

Twinmotion 2025.1.1 includes several other features.

3D Grass material allows users to drag and drop five types of grass material onto any surface. The Configurations feature, first introduced in Twinmotion 2025.1 to allow users to build interactive 3D presentations that showcase different variations of a project, has also been enhanced. Users can now export configurators to Twinmotion Cloud, for easy sharing, and use a mesh as a trigger — for example clicking on a door handle to open a door.

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Epic Games has unveiled Twinmotion 2025.1, the latest release of its easy-to-use visualisation software, widely used by AEC professionals.

New features include volumetric clouds; enhanced real-time rendering of orthographic views; and ‘configurations’ that enable users to build interactive 3D presentations that showcase different variations of a project.

To enhance the realism of exterior scenes, Twinmotion now has the option to use ‘true volumetric clouds’. Users can author the appearance of clouds by adjusting their altitude, coverage, and distribution, and by fine-tuning their density, colour, puffiness, and other settings.

Volumetric clouds can be affected by wind and will cast shadows. The software includes several presets so users can choose different cloud formations as starting points for their own creations.

Adding further control to exterior scenes, users can now adjust the clarity and colour of the dynamic sky via new settings for turbidity and atmosphere density. In addition, the colour or temperature of the sun (or the directional light in the case of HDRI skies) can also be set, as well as colour, height and density of fog.

Environment settings can be saved as presets, enabling users to apply all the settings in the environment panel in a single click. There are several defaults, including “Golden hour,” “Sunrise glow,” “Rainy day,” and “Mars horizon.”

To showcase different variations of a project to clients or stakeholders, Twinmotion now includes a new ‘Configurations’ feature. Users can instantly switch between the variations when using Twinmotion in Fullscreen mode or when viewing images, panoramas, videos, or sequences in local presentations.

For architects, real-time rendering of orthographic views in Standard and Lumen lighting modes has been ‘significantly enhanced’. There’s now support for shadows, and the black outline around objects has been removed. According to the developers, this enables users to quickly produce high-quality plan and elevation views without using the Path Tracer, as well as facilitating more precise interactive object placement.

Elsewhere, users now have more choice when rendering shadows in real-time rendering mode. New Virtual Shadow Map (VSM) technology is said to produce shadows that are more accurate than standard shadows and that are more consistent with path-traced shadows.

There are also several Camera animation enhancements, a measure tool that enables you to precisely measure the distance between two arbitrary points, and automatic level of detail (LOD) generation to help maintain real-time performance when working with complex imported meshes.

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When it comes to arch viz, everyone dreams of a silky-smooth viewport and the ability to render final quality images and videos in seconds. However, such performance often comes with a hefty price tag. Many professionals are left wondering: is the added cost truly justified?

To help answer this question, we put some of the latest workstation hardware through its paces using a variety of popular arch viz tools. Before diving into the detailed benchmark results on the following pages, here are some key considerations to keep in mind.

This article is part of AEC Magazine’s 2025 Workstation Special report

GPU processing

Real-time viz software like Enscape, Lumion, D5 Render, and Twinmotion rely on the GPU to do the heavy lifting. These tools offer instant, high-quality visuals directly in the viewport, while also allowing top-tier images and videos to be rendered in mere seconds or minutes.

The latest releases support hardware ray tracing, a feature built into modern GPUs from Nvidia, AMD and Intel. While ray tracing demands significantly more computational power than traditional rasterisation, it delivers unparalleled realism in lighting and reflections.

GPU performance in these tools is typically evaluated in two ways: Frames Per Second (FPS) and render time. FPS measures viewport interactivity — higher numbers mean smoother navigation and a better user experience — while render time, expressed in seconds, determines how quickly final outputs are generated. Both metrics are crucial, and we’ve used them to benchmark various software in this article.

For your own projects, aim for a minimum of 24–30 FPS for a smooth and interactive viewport experience. Performance gains above this threshold tend to have diminishing returns, although we expect hardcore gamers might disagree. Display resolution is another critical factor. If your GPU struggles to maintain performance, reducing resolution from 4K to FHD can deliver a significant boost.

It’s worth noting that while some arch viz software supports multiple GPUs, this only affects render times rather than viewport performance. Tools like V-Ray, for instance, scale exceptionally well with multiple GPUs, but in order to take advantage you’ll need a workstation with adequate power and sufficient PCIe slots to accommodate the GPUs.

GPU memory

The amount of memory a GPU has is often more critical than its processing power. In some software, running out of GPU memory can cause crashes or significantly slow down performance. This happens because the GPU is forced to borrow system memory from the workstation via the PCIe bus, which is much slower than accessing its onboard memory.

The impact of insufficient GPU memory depends on your workflow. For final renders, it might simply mean waiting longer for images or videos to finish processing. However, in a real-time viewport, running out of memory can make navigation nearly impossible. In extreme cases, we’ve seen frame rates plummet to 1-2 FPS, rendering the scene completely unworkable.

Fortunately, GPU memory and processing power usually scale together. Professional workstation GPUs, such as Nvidia RTX or AMD Radeon Pro, generally offer significantly more memory than their consumer-grade counterparts like Nvidia GeForce or AMD Radeon. This is especially noticeable at the lower end of the market. For example, the Nvidia RTX 2000 Ada, a 70W GPU, is equipped with 16 GB of onboard memory.

For real-time visualisation workflows, we recommend a minimum of 16 GB, though 12 GB can suffice for laptops. Anything less could require compromises, such as simplifying scenes and textures, reducing display resolution, or lowering the quality of exported renders.

CPU processing

CPU rendering was once the standard for most arch viz workflows, but today it often plays second fiddle to GPU rendering. That said, it remains critically important for certain software. Chaos Corona, a specialist tool for arch viz, relies entirely on the CPU for rendering. Meanwhile, Chaos V-Ray gives users the flexibility to choose between CPU and GPU. Some still favour the CPU renderer for its greater control and the ability to harness significantly more memory when paired with the right workstation hardware. For example, while the top-tier Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Generation GPU comes with an impressive 48 GB of on-board memory, a Threadripper Pro workstation can support up to 1 TB or more of system memory.

CPU renderers scale exceptionally well with core count — the more cores your processor has, the faster your renders. However, as core counts increase, frequencies drop, so doubling the cores won’t necessarily cut render times in half.

Take the 96-core Threadripper Pro 7995WX, for example. It’s a powerhouse that’s the ultimate dream for arch viz specialists. But does it justify its price tag—nearly 20 times that of the 16-core AMD Ryzen 9950X—for rendering performance that’s only 3 to 4 times faster? As arch viz becomes more prevalent across AEC firms, that’s a tough call for many.

Chaos Corona 10

Chaos Corona is a CPU-only renderer designed for arch viz. It scales well with more CPU cores. But the 96-core Threadripper Pro 7995WX, despite having six times the cores of the 16-core AMD Ryzen 9 9950X and achieving an overclocked all-core frequency of 4.87 GHz, delivers only three times the performance.

Chaos V-Ray 6

Chaos V-Ray is a versatile photorealistic renderer, renowned for its realism. It includes both a CPU and GPU renderer. The CPU renderer supports the most features and can handle the largest datasets, as it relies on system memory. Performance scales efficiently with additional cores.

V-Ray GPU works with Nvidia GPUs. It is often faster than the CPU renderer, and can make very effective use of multiple GPUs, with performance scaling extremely well. However, the finite onboard memory can restrict the size of scenes. To address this, V-Ray GPU includes several memory-saving features, such as offloading textures to system memory. It also offers a hybrid mode where both the CPU and GPU work together, optimising performance across both processors.

D5 Render 2.9

D5 Render is a real-time arch viz tool, based on Unreal Engine. Its ray tracing technology is built on DXR, requiring a GPU with dedicated ray-tracing cores from Nvidia, Intel, or AMD.

The software uses Nvidia DLSS, allowing Nvidia GPUs to boost real time performance. Multiple GPUs are not supported.

The benchmark uses 4 GB of GPU memory, so all GPUs are compared on raw performance alone. Real time scores are capped at 60 FPS.

Enscape 3.3

Enscape is a very popular tool for real-time arch viz. It supports hardware ray tracing, and also Nvidia DLSS, but not the latest version.

For testing we used an older version of Enscape (3.3). This had some incompatibility issues with AMD GPUs, so we limited our testing to Nvidia. Enscape 4.2, the latest release, supports AMD.

We focused on real time performance, rather than time to render. The gap between the RTX 5000 Ada and RTX 6000 Ada was not that big. Our dataset uses 11 GB of GPU memory, which caused the software to crash when using the Nvidia RTX A1000 (8GB).

Lumion Pro 2024

Lumion is a real-time arch viz tool known for its exterior scenes in context with nature.

The software will benefit from a GPU with hardware raytracing, but those with older GPUs can still render with rasterisation.

Our test scene uses 11 GB of GPU memory, which meant the 8 GB GPUs struggled. The Nvidia RTX A1000 slowed down, while the AMD Radeon Pro W7500 & W7600 caused crashes. The high-end AMD GPUs did OK against Nvidia, but slowed down in ray tracing.

Twinmotion 2024.1.2

Twinmotion from Epic Games is a real-time viz tool powered by Unreal Engine. It includes a DXR path tracer, for accurate lighting and Global Illumination (GI) and will benefit from one or more GPUs with hardware raytracing – AMD or Nvidia.

Our test scene uses 20 GB of GPU memory, massively slowing down the 8 GB GPUs. The 8 GB AMD cards caused the software to crash with the Path Tracer. The high-end AMD GPUs did OK against Nvidia but were well off the pace in path tracing.

Nvidia DLSS – using AI to boost performance in real-time

Nvidia DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) is a suite of AI-driven technologies designed to significantly enhance 3D performance (frame rates), in real-time visualisation tools.

Applications including Chaos Enscape, Chaos Vantage and D5 Render, have integrated DLSS to deliver smoother experiences, and to make it possible to navigate larger scenes on the same GPU hardware.

DLSS comprises three distinct technologies, all powered by the Tensor Cores in Nvidia RTX GPUs:

Super Resolution
This boosts performance by using AI to render higher-resolution frames from lower-resolution inputs. For instance, it enables 4K-quality output while the GPU processes frames at FHD resolution, saving core GPU resources without compromising visual fidelity.

DLSS Ray Reconstruction
This enhances image quality by using AI to generate additional pixels for intensive ray-traced scenes.

Frame Generation
This increases performance by using AI to interpolate and generate extra frames. While DLSS 3.0 could generate one additional frame, DLSS 4.0, exclusive to Nvidia’s upcoming Blackwellbased GPUs, can generate up to three frames between traditionally rendered ones.

When these three technologies work together, an astonishing 15 out of every 16 pixels can be AI-generated.

DLSS 4.0 will soon be supported in D5 Render, promising transformative performance gains. Nvidia has demonstrated that it can elevate frame rates from 22 FPS (without DLSS 4.0) to an incredible 87 FPS.

This article is part of AEC Magazine’s 2025 Workstation Special report

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• Features
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Epic Games is changing the way its Unreal Engine, Twinmotion and RealityCapture tools are licensed for firms in the AEC sector, and other industries other than game development.

Users at such companies that are generating under $1M in annual gross revenue will be able to access the tools for free.

However, firms that go over that threshold, will be subject to new seat-based enterprise software pricing from late April with the launch of Unreal Engine 5.4.

The annual cost per seat of $1,850 will include access to Unreal Engine 5.4 (and future versions released during the subscription period) along with Twinmotion for architect-friendly visualisation and RealityCapture, for creating realistic 3D models from photos using photogrammetry.

Twinmotion and RealityCapture will still be available to purchase individually. Twinmotion seats will be priced at $445 per year, and includes access to Twinmotion Cloud, as well as all updates released during the subscription period. Individual seats of RealityCapture will cost  $1,250 per year, starting with RealityCapture 1.4.

 For those currently using Unreal Engine 5.3 or any other prior versions, pricing changes will not apply until an update to 5.4.

Epic Games has also announced its goal to ‘fully integrate’ Twinmotion and RealityCapture with Unreal Engine by the end of 2025. The plan is to make them ‘fully accessible’ within the Unreal Editor.

Find this article plus many more in the March / April 2024 Edition of AEC Magazine

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The post New licensing for Unreal Engine and Twinmotion appeared first on AEC Magazine.

Epic Games had added Lumen, Unreal Engine 5’s dynamic global illumination and reflections system, to Twinmotion 2023.2, the latest release of its AEC-focused real-time visualisation tool.

Lumen enables indirect lighting to adapt on the fly to changes to direct lighting or geometry — for example, changing the sun’s angle with the time of day or opening an exterior door. According to Epic Games, it brings new levels of realism to real-time applications, and enables stills and videos to be rendered with close to path-traced quality, but in a fraction of the time.

Twinmotion 2023.2 also includes the ability to import Adobe Substance 3D parametric materials in the SBSAR file format and store them in the Twinmotion library; these could be materials created by the user in Substance Designer, or ones from many of the material libraries available in this format.

All exposed parameters are available to edit in the Twinmotion Properties panel—for example, users could separately change the stitching colour and the main colour on a piece of fabric, and adjust the stitch length. Textures are generated on the fly when tweaks are made.

Users can also paint and scatter far more asset types, including Sketchfab, Quixel, Us-er Library, and most of the Twinmotion library assets. According to Epic Games, this allows you to dress your scene in record time. Previously, this was limited to just the vegetation section of the Twinmotion library.

Twinmotion 2023.2 also offers Early Access to a new feature that allows for the import of ani-mated FBX, glTF, and GLB files to create ‘more advanced, bespoke, and believable experiences’. Architects can use their own animations, or animated files from Sketchfab.

Also new is support for Local exposure, which mimics the way a person’s eyes react to different lighting conditions, preserving details in shadows and highlights. According to Epic Games, it’s especially useful for challenging high-dynamic-range scenes, for ex-ample ones that include both dark interiors and bright exteriors in the same view.

Meanwhile, enhancements to existing features include path-traced transparency for water materials, improved weather particles for more realistic rainy and snowy scenes, and an optimised clear glass material for faster rendering.

Finally, new WebVR support for Panorama Sets uploaded to Twinmotion Cloud means that project participants can launch and navigate them with full immersion from teth-ered or untethered VR headsets.

The post Epic Games brings Lumen to Twinmotion 2023.2 appeared first on AEC Magazine.

Autodesk has announced that Twinmotion, the AEC-focused real-time visualisation tool from Epic Games, is now a ‘feature’ of the Autodesk AEC Collection. It will essentially mean that Twinmotion, which is based on Unreal Engine, will be given away free with every active seat of Revit.

[Update]: Autodesk has clarified that Twinmotion for Revit will be available with subscriptions to standalone Revit, the AEC Collection, Flex or Enterprise Agreements and available in a future release.

Unlike previous Twinmotion promotions with Graphisoft (Archicad), McNeel (Rhino), Vectorworks and Bricsys (BricsCAD BIM), this is not a limited time offer.

According to Cambashi, there are over 500,000 active seats of Revit out there and the ‘free’ deal will mean Twinmotion will compete with popular industry add-ons, such as Enscape and Lumion, which come at additional cost.

While relations between Epic Games and Autodesk have been frosty in the past, over the last two years it became clear the two companies have been getting on a lot better.

Read what AEC Magazine thinks

Obviously for Autodesk customers, a permanent free license of Twinmotion alongside Revit is a great additional benefit to the Autodesk AEC Collection – especially as some customers, such as the Open Letter Group, have been complaining that they install and use only 10% of the applications that come with it.

Bringing Twinmotion into the fold appears to add real value to Autodesk’s AEC offering. Twinmotion will also give Autodesk Revit customers a pathway into Unreal Engine, for delivering highly customisable and ultra-realistic real-time environments.

From the perspective of Epic Games, the deal will give it access to the lion’s share of global AEC customers, an industry where it has its own B2C ecosystem of content for Twinmotion.

We are not sure if this offer applies to those who held onto their perpetual Autodesk licences.

What AEC Magazine thinks

Autodesk, despite owning an entire Media and Entertainment (M&E) division, which develops Maya and 3ds Max, has in recent years tended to partner with gaming / visualisation-focussed developers to co-develop viz applications for its ecosystem.

In 2018, Autodesk announced a strategic collaboration with Unity to ensure full interoperability between Autodesk products and Unity’s real time engine, specifically focussing on Revit and AEC.

Autodesk had already subcontracted the work on the FBX format to Unity. This partnership came at the detriment to all other visualisation developers, competing against one that was ‘anointed’ and had access to much tighter integration with Revit. Epic Games was certainly on the outside of the tent. However, the product that was developed – Unity Reflect – was more focused on collaborative workflows than design viz. It was able to bring in valuable BIM data from Revit and other AEC applications, and later got the ability to add annotations. However, development of Unity Reflect has been slow and, despite showing the syncing of annotations with Autodesk BIM 360 way back at Autodesk University 2019, this feature is still a work in progress.

To many in industry, it soon became clear that Unity didn’t have the focus or marketing to benefit as much from the partnership, as Epic Games might. Since taking on the AEC market proper in 2018, Epic Games has shown a laser-like focus on the sector, through development, acquisition and integration of applications and content for architects, engineers and construction professionals..

While relations between Epic Games and Autodesk have been frosty in the past, over the last two years it became clear the two companies have been getting on a lot better.

One of the first signs was Epic Games joining Autodesk on stage at Autodesk University 2021. This has now led to the Twinmotion / Revit deal and the announcement of a strategic collaboration to “accelerate immersive real-time (RT) experiences”, which includes plans to go beyond AEC, into M&E and manufacturing.

Recently at the AIA (American Institute of Architects) Large Firm Round Table (LFRT) Epic Games offered participating firms free licenses of Twinmotion / Unreal, and the majority took them up. The company used this to gauge the ease of use and level of support required in giving away the software.

Looking at the deal from a broader perspective, the rendering, real-time and Common Data Environment (CDE) markets are merging. Nvidia has a major play with its interpretation of the open USD format through its Omniverse platform. Nvidia has the firepower of GPU acceleration, real-time rendering, and simulation – plus plug-ins for Revit, Rhino, SketchUp, Archicad and others, offering a solution for holding the geometry from all project collaborators.

As an outside observer, we see nervousness from the traditional pure-play software firms, pondering if Nvidia, which was once just a hardware firm, is friend or foe as it ploughs into the space like a meteorite.

The objectives of Autodesk and Epic Games seem to be aligned and this deal provides mutual back rubbing, increased combined clout and capability to compete in the ongoing gamification of AEC.

With additional reporting from Greg Corke

The post Autodesk to bundle Epic Games Twinmotion with Revit appeared first on AEC Magazine.

Next month Epic Games is inviting viz artists and visual effects professionals to discover the architects, engineers, latest real-time innovations that are transforming architecture, engineering, and construction.

From cutting-edge digital twins to advancements in immersive design, attendees of Build: Architecture 2021 will hear how Zaha Hadid Architects, HOK, Foster + Partners and other leading AEC firms are spearheading innovative realtime projects.

The event will be split into three acts: act one will focus on design storytelling with architectural visualisation software Twinmotion; act two will showcase innovative projects with Unreal Engine; while act three will expand into the realms of digital twins and collosal open worlds.

There will also be a whole host of focused ‘Dev Lounges’ where attendees can pick the brains of the industry presenters and Epic Games technology experts on all things real time.

Below are some of the project highlights that will be presented at the event.

Global design firm Cannon Design is a 1,200 person architectural firm based in New York. Twinmotion has allowed its design teams to collaborate in digital real-time environments and work closer together on large healthcare projects.

For Mercy Hospital in Phoenix, the team had to quickly create animations and visuals of both indoor and outdoor environments for a project covering over 300,000 sq.ft.

Using Twinmotion’s collaborative cloud feature to engage with customers in real-time helped Cannon Design — and its customers — find a common place to work out design issues to make realtime design changes on the project.

Global architectural design practice Zaha Hadid used mixed platform design and game engines to bring an interactive design experience to consumers and stakeholders in Beyabu, Honduras.

The modular blocks of buildings, coupled with computational design parameters, have been merged into Unreal Engine to provide a photorealistic, realtime design configurator that allow users to integrate with their designs ‘like never before’. The technology extended to working with the manufacturing and production chains to bring the purchaser’s design request to reality.

The Canadian Parliamentary Precinct in Ottawa, Ontario is undergoing a decades-long renovation to modernise operational infrastructure, improve building performance, and enhance visitor experiences for generations to come.

HOK is leading the architectural design and conservation efforts with technical processes driven by three main principles: all physical conditions — past, present, and future — must be documented; the development projects and outcome must be transparent; and all data streams must be available in real-time.

For the project, HOK harnessed the power of reality capture, leveraging realtime technologies to share the various states of construction/progress to manage scope, and incorporating the data into daily workflows to better illustrate design intent, constraints, and options to the client.

Digital twin platform 3D Repo was instrumental in providing persistent cloud-based storage and model federation for HOK as part of the project.

3D revisions are automatically optimised and made available via APIs, saving months of time whenever a design change happens. By linking the same APIs to third-party business intelligence applications for extended data validation and inspection, 3D Repo is helping to remove risk from the engineering process even further.

Danish architecture studio BIG will present Chongqing, the home of a new Hi-Tech Zone, a centre of innovation for China for developing future technologies. The project masterplan will integrate ‘artificial intelligence of things’, robotics, networking and big data.

Cloud Valley will be the first project milestone. a landmark for science and technology where the barriers between human and artificial intelligence are removed and the focus is on creating a space for technology and nature to thrive together.

The project is spread across two plots totalling an area of 51,000 m2. Each plot will be covered by a generous and permeable green landscape, beneath which will be a village of transparent buildings. These are shaped to efficiently accommodate the innovative activities planned for the campus, such as sports events, art exhibitions and product fairs.

The porous structure of the urban fabric will create generous green courtyards with natural light and ventilation.

Vouse is a Singapore-based cross-technology design consultancy that provides interactive applications development for built environment industries.

Developed within Unreal Engine, the featured use-case at Build: Architecture 2021 — Changi Airport Digital Twin — is an integrated data model that synchronises operational data in real-time.

Together with the Changi Airport Group Terminal 5 planning team, applications were built using game technology to suit different operational needs and users within the airport environment.

Creative digital agency PureBlink, together with Elad Real Estate, has created an interactive sales tool for a new development ‘Galleria on the Park’.

The master plan consists of eight different buildings on an eight acre park, and the ability to bring users into an immersive experience to explore the urban development helped buyers better understand the vision.

Online sales tools also helped support the launch of ‘Galleria on the Park’ helping Elad hit its sales goals in a shorter period of time through Covid.

Registration to Build:Architecture is completely free and there will be different start times to cater to PDT, EDT, GMT and CET time zones. For more information click here.

The post Epic Games – Build: Architecture 2021 preview appeared first on AEC Magazine.

Twinmotion, the easy-to-use arch viz tool that Epic Games acquired in 2019, finally has its long-awaited plug-in for Unreal Engine that enables users to import Twinmotion projects into the Unreal Editor.

With this extended pipeline, an architect can communicate preliminary concept ideas—such as visually indicating the type of materials, lighting, context, and other project elements—in Twinmotion, and then pass the project on to a visualisation specialist for further refinement in Unreal Engine.

Twinmotion 2021.1 also features Early Access to a new Presenter Cloud service that lets users publish a presentation to the cloud, and then share a URL with a collaborator or stakeholder. The service uses pixel streaming technology so all the graphics processing is done on a high-end GPU in the cloud and the collaborator can work interactively with the presentation on any desktop/laptop browser.

The ability to import Twinmotion files into Unreal Engine is by no means a finished project, but it’s certainly an important first step and gives Epic Games a big advantage over the competition. Read what AEC Magazine thinks

The Presenter Cloud service, which Marc Petit, VP, general manager, Unreal Engine, first alluded to last year in this AEC Magazine article, is still in beta and being rolled out progressively. At the moment it is a free and exclusive service for those with a full commercial license of Twinmotion.

Phasing has also been added to Presenter files for this release,, enabling users to remotely present different stages of a project’s construction schedule sequentially. Phasing can be played from any camera position.

Following the acquisition by Epic Games of Quixel Megascans in 2019, the new version comes with thousands of high-quality materials and assets integrated right into the Twinmotion library. Megascans 3D assets include high-quality objects in categories like buildings, food, industrial, and nature, while the surfaces offer a vast collection of high-fidelity materials covering everything from bark to bricks, and from marble to metal. To save space these libraries are hosted on the cloud until required. There are an additional 140 new scene assets for the Twinmotion asset library, including 20 new Japanese and American trees, 60 furniture assets for populating gyms and street workout areas, and 60 new ready-posed humans.

Epic Games is also introducing a new Datasmith Direct Link for Revit, a first step in replacing the product’s Direct Link plugins with ‘more powerful, flexible versions’ that will support synchronisation with multiple files simultaneously, as well as making multiple improvements to lighting intensities, auto-exposure, and Bloom. Users can easily import their existing building models from most other popular BIM and CAD programs including Archicad, SketchUp Pro, RIKCAD, and Rhino.

There are also new non-realistic rendering styles—hidden line, hidden line shaded, wood model, metal model, white model (clay render), and default material—to help architects focus on particular aspects of the design, such as lighting or form, or to represent a more technical hand-drawn style.

“Twinmotion 2021.1 has the capacity to transform the ability of AEC professionals to solve complex problems in real time by visualizing them in 3D, and to easily communicate their proposals to colleagues and stakeholders who may not have an understanding of traditional 2D drawings,” said Ken Pimentel, AEC Industry Manager at Epic Games. “Twinmotion is a vital, yet easy to master, tool for those building the future, whether you’re creating a photoreal digital twin of a city for urban planners to understand a new development or if you’re part of a construction team planning on-site logistics. Twinmotion is also an integral part of the iterative architectural design process and it’s also a tool for students to bring their ideas to life.”

Twinmotion 2021.1 is currently available at a 25% discount price of $370 USD for a perpetual license. Offer ends April 1, 2021. This introductory price includes all subsequent upgrade releases until the end of December 2021

AEC Magazine’s view

Twinmotion led the way for Arch Viz renderers with out-of-the-box content and the new point release does not disappoint. But it goes way beyond a functionality boost.

User have been crying out for the ability to import Twinmotion scenes into Unreal Engine for some time. In fact, we first learnt about its development in this 2018 interview with Twinmotion’s Martin Krasemann before the Epic Games acquisition.

The new workflow means AEC firms can now more confidently start to develop viz assets in Twinmotion at the early stage of design and then use them as the foundation on which to build high fidelity, cinematic quality interactive experiences in Unreal Engine. This could include accurate lighting and material scenarios, higher-quality visualisation outputs, animations, and other advanced behaviours.

This is by no means a finished project – for example, the importer does not bring across all Twinmotion assets and it’s not yet possible to bring Unreal Engine assets into Twinmotion – but it’s certainly an important first step and gives Epic Games a big advantage over the competition.

The Presenter Cloud service is another notable advancement for Twinmotion 2021.1 as it means anyone can now view Twinmotion content in full interactive 3D regardless of which device they are using. Like most real time viz tools, Twinmotion needs a high-end GPU to get the best out of the software, so putting this in the cloud makes huge sense. And, in true Epic Games fashion, the service will be free, at least for the time being.

Twinmotion 2021.1 is based on Unreal Engine 4. With Unreal Engine 5 due out this year, the next big step will be to leverage some of the big leaps promised in the new engine, especially film quality geometry assets (swapping out lower poly Quixel Megascans for really high versions), the lumen dynamic global lighting system, plus ‘nanite’ allowing content with truly insane polycounts.

Twinmotion and Unreal development show some joined up thinking and 2021 is when the conversion really starts to deliver end to end Arch Viz workflows.

Meanwhile, read our in-depth article, about the huge investment Epic Games is making in the AEC industry and how its MegaGrant fund is helping driving third party and customer development.

The post New pipeline links Twinmotion 2021.1 to Unreal Engine appeared first on AEC Magazine.

To date, Unreal Engine has predominantly been seen as a visualisation tool for architectural viz or multi-platform immersive experiences. The concentration on real-time, and ever higher quality output, as well as strategic acquisitions, has placed it in competition with dedicated arch viz rendering engines.

While this is certainly the case, it’s not the whole story. Unreal Engine is also becoming a common development platform as the foundation for new commercial products using its SDK (Software Development Kit), as well as a platform with which to integrate.

With customers now looking to create their own tools and bespoke BIM workflows, Unreal Engine has also become a popular choice as a start point, as it offers a capable stack of visualisation and big data integration tools, unencumbered by the weight of BIM.

AEC Magazine regularaly sees projects from the likes of Gensler, HOK, Populous, Foster+Partners, ARUP, Jacobs, Buro Happold, SNC Lavalin which utillise Unreal Engine as part of the design process, from concept to completion. In CGarchitect’s annual survey Unreal has come to dominate the Arch Viz landscape, even when separated from Twinmotion responses.

At Build London 2018 and Build London 2019 several Unreal Engine customers presented their developments using the engine in their design processes. These include the likes of KPF (lighting analysis), Shop Architects (VR in construction / component assembly), Zaha Hadid Architects (VR), Allford Hall Monaghan Morris (AHMM) (modelling within a city scale), City of Gothenburg (City Modelling), CallisonRTKL (mass VR analysis of shoppers’ movements and eyelines), ÅF Infrastructure (multi-hundred kilometre train track visualisation) Ramirent (Europe’s largest construction rental company) (safety training).

Other customer applications supported by Unreal Engine are more altruistic, such as Buro Happold’s, collective experiment, BHoM (Buildings and Habitats object Model) which aims to provide a single common language between AEC applications.
Instead of creating translators between every possible tool, the idea is to just have to write one single link per application to connect to all the others, such as Grasshopper, Excel, Dynamo and Visual Studio

Acquisitions for AEC

Epic’s focus on AEC as a market segment has been a multi-year progression through in-house development, partnerships and acquisition. When Epic acquires, it also has a modus operandi to either make the technology free, free for a long time or drastically reduce the cost to users.

With data portability and repurposing being a constant thorn in the industry’s side, Epic acquired Datasmith (formerly called Motiva Unreal Scene) from Motiva, to enable optimised and geometrically clean architectural models from Revit, Rhino, SketchUp and others, to be brought into the Unreal Engine environment. Datasmith has since been rewritten and updated and is now free for all users and is an alternative to Autodesk’s FBX.

Epic then acquired ‘Twinmotion’ from Abvent in 2019. Twinmotion is a mature architectural viz tool which comes with a huge library of dynamic vegetation, vehicles, people, street furniture and lights. This made Unreal Engine a hub for early stage viz by architects, all the way up to high-end real-time virtual environments. The software also features direct one-click synchronisation with Revit, Rhino, ArchiCAD and others. Twinmotion was originally given away for the first year, where it gained 500,000 registered users. It currently costs £348 for a perpetual licence.

The latest purchase, Slovakian-based ‘Capturing Realty’ (read our analysis) adds photogrammetry to 3D modelling to the Unreal environment. From a collection of photographs of a building, street block or city captured by drone, it will be possible to rapidly create a 3D model showing as-built conditions in Unreal. Reality capture is increasingly popular in AEC projects, from refurbishment to monitoring construction (5D), architecture to civil engineering.

Epic’s appetite for new data formats which benefit from fast visualisation is getting into some very cutting-edge, AEC-specific workflows. It has also forged partnerships with key industry players for integrations and deeper development.

Partnerships

No man is an island and software companies in the AEC space need to play well together for the good of their customers. Epic has formed tight integrations with Nemetschek’s Graphisoft ArchiCAD and Vectorworks BIM platforms, including Unreal Engine and Twinmotion.

This is in addition to Nemetschek having its own rendering brand (Maxon Cinema4D). Italy-based Acca with its Edificius BIM tool has also used Unreal Engine to create its VRiBIM extension.

McNeel’s Rhinocerous and its Rhino Inside extension is now supported with Unreal Engine. Rhino Inside operates like a data bus between AEC applications. It allows data to flow between proprietary systems and pop-up inside a wide range of environments. It should be possible to be modelling in Revit or BricsCAD, Blender or ACCA and get that data fed into Unreal Engine via Rhino Inside.

Esri has integrated with Unreal Engine with its ArcGIS ARVR and CityEngine products and has its own ‘game engine’ development team. The company recently demonstrated analysis of wildfires, at a country level, using the particle system in Unreal.

The major CAD developer missing from this list is, of course, Autodesk. In 2017, Autodesk picked Unity as a specialised partner to address the viz, VR/AR market, co-developing FBX and collaborative workflows with data round-tripping with Revit, Maya and 3ds Max. This move has handicapped most of the competition in this space for the timebeing.

It was also an interesting decision at the time, as Autodesk has its own Media and Entertainment division that had a dedicated VR team with products. It was as if Autodesk opted out of real-time. We have heard rumours that Autodesk has now restarted some in-house VR development.

Ken Pimentel, AEC industry manager in the enterprise team at Epic Games told AEC Magazine, “BIM standards have implications beyond the traditional AEC players. As technology enables the convergence of industries and processes, media and entertainment (M&E) companies want a seat at the table too.

“Digital twins, smart cities, and other forms of innovation can only be efficiently deployed if the underlying BIM data is coherent across buildings, cities and regions.”

Where Epic can work with Autodesk, it’s willing to help solve problems jointly and there are some signs that Autodesk, woth its stated intention to be more open, is willing to work with other players in this space once again.

But partnerships are not all about working with the major vendors. It’s also about teaming up with innovative small firms who are looking to make a difference.

Trezi, for example, is the world’s first immersive platform which connects designers with building product manufacturers in collaborative sessions. This is the Zoom of the VR AEC space. From the reverse angle it also allows AEC product manufacturers to showcase their designs.

Safe Software’s FME creates a space where you can collate assets quickly in Unreal Engine – point clouds, BIM models, 2D shapefiles, GIS. HOK used FME automate much of the modelling of 130 square miles with 2 million auto-generated buildings from an existing data set, as well as integrate a GIS dataset.

There are many more – click here to see a selection.

MegaGrants – Unreal Engine in architecture

Launched in 2019, Epic dedicated $100 million to what it calls MegaGrants, a fund which it endows on valid firms or people looking to develop using the Unreal Engine. These could come from a wide range of areas: game developers, media + entertainment, tool developers, open source projects and AEC customer / professionals.

By November 2020 the company had handed out $60 million in financial support to more than 1,000 developers. Some firms opt to not make their funded developments public.

MegaGrants typically range from about $5,000 to $500,000 and can cover a wide variety of development, from in house projects to full blown new products, using Unreal Engine as their foundation layer.

The biggest MegaGrant to date was substantially larger than the average. Coming in at $1.2 million dollars, it will be paid to open-source modelling tool Blender over a three-year period. For the AEC market this is of special interest, as Blender has seen a rapid rise in usage in the industry especially as a modelling tool for architects – and for a free tool it’s very capable.
Blender has spawned its own open-source BIM tool, called BlenderBIM, which has a thriving community of global developers. By funding Blender, Epic has also enabled downstream developments like this to flourish. As a side note, in July last year Microsoft also gave Blender funding and backing, lending it even more industry credibility.

The MegaGrant program is not just about money, as Epic also encourages hardware providers to join the scheme and offer limited numbers of units for grant winners, such as AMD last year and Magic Leap the year before.

Who is eligible?

Epic is looking to give grants for innovative enterprise projects in visualisation, simulation, design or VR/MR/AR projects for architecture, automotive, manufacturing – specifically non-game industry projects. Also, if you are a commercial software developer creating a tool that integrates with Unreal, or working on open-source tools that benefit the 3D graphics community. By our estimates there’s about $40 million left on the table for projects. Applications can be made here.

Epic view

We talked with Marc Petit VP, general manager, Unreal Engine at Epic Games on the topic of MegaGrants allocation. On the scale of the grants awarded, Petit explained that “Most grants fall between the $50k to $150k range, which is a lot of “free”, “no strings attached” money. We prefer to give several smaller grants than bigger ones, as the governance around it is so light.”

It’s important to remember that these are grants, not loans and do not include any loss of ownership. In qualifying development circumstances it’s also possible to use Unreal Engine royalty free.

The traditional way that software companies connect with developers has been through SDKs (Software Development Kits). The availability of these can be free but it’s become the standard that developers join a network and pay for membership to receive software, support and the SDK.

We asked Petit if the old way of attracting developers was dead? “SDKs are still valid, but I do believe that the days of making money with SDKs are over,” he replied, “It is a wise investment to incentivise people to develop for your platform. Just look at how the cloud guys seed the market, offering free credits for this.”

As to the kind of projects that Epic has funded, Petit explained, “It’s been a wide range, we provide seed funding for indie games, we fund open source projects (Blender, Godot, AliceVision, Speckle, Cesium, USD (Pixar’s Universal Scene Description) to name a few. In addition, many education curricula projects, many tools development projects. We’ve done a lot across the whole spectrum from design to prop tech! There are lots of innovative uses of Unreal Engine.”

With Unreal Engine adding serious layers of capability, which AEC developers can utilise, and with today’s popular BIM systems often slowing down with large models, we asked Petit how he saw the gamification of AEC and Epic’s role within it.

“We’re building a platform so that you can capture and display the word as-is (and as-built) and integrate your design data in it – building, infrastructure etc… With the combination of Unreal Engine, Twinmotion, MegaScans and Reality Capture, we’re providing a set of tools to achieve the fundamentals of putting the data together and offering high performance, yet easy-to-use visualisation in a platform that is extensible.

“We are building a digital twin platform that is truly open and accessible and that spans multiple industries (e.g. AEC, MFG, GIS). We see our role as enabling application developers.

“There are already many companies starting to build solutions for the AEC space on top of Unreal Engine, from Structure Studios (architecture) to Modumate (architecture), to Vision (civils) or something like Project Anywhere (a world-scale simulation based on Microsoft Azure instance, powered by Nvidia GPU) and a few more who are not public yet.”

With so much money going to so many projects and companies, we wondered how Epic defined success. Petit replied, “We view the Epic MegaGrant program as very successful and for us, success is a vibrant ecosystem where stakeholders feel empowered, supported and achieve their goals with our technology. And we want to do this in a way that is fair and transparent. And if, in the process, we get goodwill, that’s all upside!”

Unreal Engine in architecture – conclusion

Epic is building its own ecosystem. With the ‘gamification’ of the AEC market, it’s clear that the intention is to flesh out Unreal Engine’s modelling capabilities to include more of the standard data formats and capabilities which AEC tools and customers rely on.

Just being a great visualisation and display engine is really not where Epic plans to remain. The core capability to display billions of polys and render in real time, is potentially a great place to start designing in-situ, unencumbered, and now at a city scale and rendered in real time. Performance at this scale with BIM data is beguiling and Unreal Engine 5 is coming out soon too.

Where can you find Unreal Engine?

3D Repo

3D Repo is a SaaS platform for BIM coordination in the cloud. The collaborative software, accessible from a browser, allows users to manage 3D model revisions, add comments, perform data validation, clash check, identify model changes, track health and safety, visualise 4D planning and host live collaboration sessions. The company gained its MegaGrant to work on a new cloud-based digital twins service based on Unreal Engine.

AECOM

To prove MegaGrants go to even the biggest of customers wishing to carry out research and development (R&D), industry infrastructure giant AECOM was included in November 2020 in Epic Games’ MegaGrant list of recipients.
Turning over approximately $13.2 billion last year, the global firm is very active in visualisation and virtual reality (VR) research and usage. No specific project was listed against the grant.

Bentley Systems Synchro

Pennsylvania-based Bentley Systems, the creator of MicroStation, ProjectWise and iTwin cloud services, was included in Epic Games’ November 2020 update on the MegaGrant recipients. This is for work to be done in integrating its Synchro digital construction management platform with Unreal Engine. Synchro tracks cost, sequencing (4D) and field submittals and uses very visual displays to show the state of projects.

Beyond CAD Vision

Beyond CAD Vision is a visualisation tool for civil engineering projects. The software is currently in development and is the recipient of an Epic MegaGrant. It is a standalone application for transportation or other civil projects and provides 3D file import, a 3D library and advanced traffic movement, where cars accelerate, decelerate and stop at traffic lights. It will also be possible to make still images or video in real time. The software is due out in 2021.

Cintoo

French developer Cintoo has created a cloud-based collaborative, scan & BIM platform to manage and distribute scan data. The Cintoo cloud platform enables virtual coordination, project reviews, issue tracking and progress monitoring on meshed point clouds. The Epic MegaGrant was awarded to expand the use of Cintoo Cloud with Unreal Engine, getting faster streaming and removing the need for creating photo textured models and allowing the integration of BIM geometry.

Cesium

Cesium is a developer of 3D geospatial solutions, specialising in the cloud-streaming of big geospatial content for global scale terrain and city models. Cesium for Unreal will be the first ‘high precision globe’ in the engine, bringing real-world detail and accuracy to simulated environments. The company is developing this as a free and open source plug-in. There will be an optional subscription for access to global 3D content via the company’s Cesium ion service.

Hassell

Global multi-disciplinary architectural, design and urban planning practice Hassell teamed up with structural engineers Eckersley O’Callaghan to enter Nasa’s Martian 3D printed habitat challenge and was shortlisted in the top 10. The design featured a shell structure made of fused Martian soil and 3D printed by robots. The grant will be used to develop a VR experience of the Mars Habitat, currently on display at The Design Museum in London. The project was presented at NXTBLD 2019.

Mindesk

Forget 3D model conversion and export, Mindesk is a live link between designs in Solidworks and Rhino (Grasshopper) to Unreal Engine, supporting a number of immersive headsets. The software offers multi-user VR, with VR-based editing, supporting NURBS and 3D Bézier curves, with a bi-directional link taking the 3D VR sketches back to CAD. For Grasshopper users, sliders can be used to directly edit the script in VR, to evaluate and compare parametric designs.

Modumate

Modumate is a new design tool designed to bypass traditional CAD drawings. Buildings are laid out by drawing spaces, as a ‘massing graph’. Then separators, such as walls, floors, roofs, doors windows, stairs and railings are defined from a library. Finishes, trim and cabinets are then added. This promises to be a very rapid form of modelling and the software still provides instant renderings and walk-throughs using Unreal Engine. Users can cut the model anywhere and get accurate DWGs.

Project Anywhere

Project Anywhere was a proof of concept demo for exploring high-resolution 3D terrain and building data in real time from ‘any device’. It’s hosted on Microsoft Azure, powered by Nvidia GPUs and gives an amazingly fast world view, running a cloud-based, high-precision World Geodetic System (WGSS) through Unreal Engine. It’s both interactive and scalable for real-world simulation.

Speckle

Speckle is a cloud-based collaboration environment designed for CAD and BIM data, to provide ‘seamless data exchange’ of geometry between design and analysis tools. At its heart is an expanding library of connectors which embed in commonly used design tools, allowing geometry to flow without files. Through its APIs and SDKs users can automate very complex workflows. The grant went towards creating interoperability transport schema for Unreal Engine.

Structure Studios

Structure Studios formed in 2001 and is a long-time user of Unreal Engine. The company has developed a range of tools covering landscape (VizTerra) and deck design, swimming pool design (Pool Studio), outdoor design (VIP3D) and Yard for augmented reality designing and viewing.

Theia Interactive

Founded in 2014, Theia Interactive is a long-time Unreal Engine developer, working on immersive and XR environments for AEC, retail, aerospace and automotive. The company won an Epic MegaGrant to help it develop an online meeting room product called ‘Big Room’. The software, which is currently in beta, will provide a virtual design planning room where distributed teams can collaborate on project data. It’s aimed at architects, designers, project managers and contractors.

Tridify

Finnish developer Tridify has created a browser-based, multi-platform, multi-format BIM publishing and viewing tool. Once data is published and shared, it’s possible to measure, comment, add cutting planes and interrogate the BIM component data. The Epic MegaGrant was given to develop a new IFC format BIM streaming service to improve existing workflows and increase the quality of the viewing experience. Learn more in this AEC Magazine article.

Unreal Engine in AEC: further reading

Unreal Engine – becoming part of the design process

The post Unreal Engine in architecture, engineering & construction appeared first on AEC Magazine.

Vectorworks has teamed up with Epic Games to develop an optimised workflow from Vectorworks 2021 Service Pack 3 into Twinmotion and Unreal Engine.

According to Vectorworks, its developers have utilised the Datasmith SDK (software development kit) to ‘ensure greater fidelity of the model export’ to these real-time rendering applications.

“Our partnership with Unreal Engine is a dynamic solution to Vectorworks users allowing them to create real-time renderings of their model with open and advanced real-time 3D creation tools such as Unreal Editor and Twinmotion,” said Vectorworks director of product technology Dave Donley. “It’s an amazing opportunity to bring this partnership to our users and we’re confident they will enjoy creating cutting-edge renderings and models.”

Vectorworks is one of the last major CAD/BIM tools to get tight integration with Epic Games’ real time viz tools. Direct link plug-ins for Twinmotion and Datasmith export plug-ins for Unreal Engine have been available for ArchiCAD, Revit, SketchUp Pro and Rhino for some time.

Enhanced BIM model exchange

Vectorworks SP3 also features enhanced BIM model exchange workflows with a new connection to quality assurance software Solibri and IFC export improvements.

The two-way Solibri Direct connection creates a ‘live sync’ of a Vectorworks BIM model to its corresponding IFC model in Solibri Office for model verification, checking and coordination.

Changes made to the Vectorworks model geometry or data ‘immediately synchronise’ with the IFC model. Customers also have the option to choose what type of changes to send to Solibri.

When running a model check or verification in Solibri, identified problems will sync with Vectorworks so customers can easily make changes.

“We have partnered with Vectorworks, our Nemetschek sister company, so we can make quality available to designers when they need it the most—while they are designing,” said Solibri product director Juan Rodríguez. “By exchanging live data between the two solutions, an architect can review their project to ensure it complies with certain quality standards or regulations. Solibri Direct is not just a one-way street, it will send information back and highlight the objects that need to be reviewed in Vectorworks, so the designers can continue with their work.”

Vectorworks SP3 also includes improvements to the base quantities included for IFC export. Common objects including roofs, slabs, hardscapes, landscape areas and columns now have accurate base quantities assigned by default. According to Vectorworks, this provides better interoperability with software packages that do Quantity Takeoff (QTO) calculations, and 4D and 5D BIM simulations.

Improved project collaboration

Project sharing and collaboration has also been enhanced with the Vectorworks Cloud Services folder sharing capabilities. A new “Sync and Edit” permission allows participants to sync a shared folder to their local desktop computer, enabling workflows that require multiple users to access and edit files stored in a common location.

The post Vectorworks partners with Epic Games for new release appeared first on AEC Magazine.