Q&A with Twinmotion

We speak with Twinmotion’s Martin Krasemann on the real time rendering tool’s BIM integrations, viz deliverables, multi OS support, VR use cases and more

Q: Twinmotion offers direct Passing from a BIM model to a life-like synchronisation with Revit. environment in Twinmotion in such a and ArchiCAD. Could you dynamic way contributes to a more effecexplain a little bit about the tive workflow and a gain of time in deci workflow and how this might sion-making: Twinmotion helps stakehave changed the way your customers holders understand the design and recoguse design viz during a project? nise potential and / or necessary modifiA: A usual workflow of Twinmotion with any 3D modelling software is to export Q: How do your customers predominantthe 3D model to one of the Twinmotion- ly use Twinmotion? For producing tradisupported formats and import tional viz deliverables such it into Twinmotion to start an as images or videos, or for immersive real-time visualisa- delivering real time environtion. The main idea behind the ments that can be explored direct synchronisation with by clients and members of ArchiCAD and Revit is to sim- the design team? plify this workflow and avoid the “export/import” process A: Today, Twinmotion is that may result in lost time used mostly for creating traand information. ditional arch viz deliverables,

With these direct synchro such as images and videos. add-ins, an architect needs only to click on the “See in Twinmotion” button in his ‘‘ Architects However, we have noticed during the past two years that a growing number of BIM software, and the entire will be able Twinmotion users are experproject is synchronised in Twinmotion in a few seconds. Once synchronised in to use Twinmotion imenting with real-time virtual reality presentations, especially with the release of Twinmotion, he is free to view as a quick the VR menu introduced his project in real-time, experi- prototyping with Twinmotion 2019. ence the space of his design and immerse himself in virtual reality. Following any moditool, and then open their Twinmotion offers architects all the ways currently possible to bring their ideas to fications in the 3D model, he projects in life. Apart from standard only needs to click on “See in Unreal for images and videos, many of Twinmotion” again to update everything in Twinmotion in advanced our users are interested in other media that Twinmotion real-time. The add-ins also settings, such can produce, including 360° contain an automatic conver- as adding videos, 360° panoramas, virsion function, which replaces the basic objects coming from the BIM software with 3D aniinteractions or light tual visits with Twinlinker, and real-time standalone executable files using BIMmotion. mated objects from the baking Twinmotion library. For example, in the BIM software, the vegetation is usually just a basic billQ: Twinmotion has been around for over a decade, but last year you launched a completely new ’’ board with the shape of a tree. During the version based on Unreal Engine. What synchronisation, the Add-ins will auto- were the driving forces behind this change? matically replace the billboards with cations in the project. Twinmotion 3D animated trees that react A: With the previous technology in to the weather and seasons; the same goes Twinmotion, we reached the limits of for characters, vehicles and materials. what could be achieved in terms of quality and performance. Opting for Unreal Engine was a major decision that opened new and greater perspectives at all levels: a more realistic rendering quality, compatibility with most VR headsets, a variety of media export options and, of course, the possibility to introduce a Twinmotion macOS version to “Mac addict” architects.

Q: It’s pretty unique to have a real time viz tool that runs on Mac OSX and Windows . Are there any limitations to the Mac version (apart from, presumably, not offering direct synchronisation with Revit, which is a Windows only application)?

A: In terms of features, both the Twinmotion Windows and Mac versions are exactly the same — apart from, as you state, the macOS version does not offer direct synchronisation with Revit.

As for the performance, Twinmotion is GPU-based software. Good performance depends on the workstation’s graphics cards. While most PCs are equipped with decent graphics cards to run Twinmotion perfectly, some Macs don’t reach the minimum requirements. But things are changing for Mac users. The latest iMac Pro and the recent eGPU represent a perfect choice for Twinmotion Mac users.

Q: Once assets have been created inside Twinmotion can they be taken into Unreal for more development?

A: Being able to export a Twinmotion project into Unreal for further development is a project we are currently working on with Epic Games. Architects with technical knowledge will be able to use Twinmotion as a quick prototyping tool, and then open their projects in Unreal for advanced settings, such as adding interactions or light baking. Twinmotion is an easy and fast visualisation tool accessible for all architects. The link to Unreal Engine opens even more avenues for Twinmotion users.

Twinmotion offer, or are there plans to offer, any other ‘design review’ features such as markup or the ability to interrogate BIM data?

A: The BIM data from ArchiCAD and Revit are already retrieved during the direct synchronisation and are accessible inside Twinmotion under the Scenegraph panel. There is also a Phasing Tool, which allows you to view your project at different stages from the groundbreaking to the final delivery. We see a great interest in features for design and project review. You’re going to see more of that in the next release.

Q: How are your customers using VR and to what extent? Is VR still relatively niche?

A: VR is primarily used internally in offices for project validation. It’s never been easier for decision-makers to “physically” be inside the project and examine the design in their own way and at their own speed. Since the setup for virtual reality headsets remains complicated, most agencies set up a VR space dedicated to VR exploration and invite people in.

I wouldn’t say that VR is still a niche concept. Instead, it is more and more accepted in the design and architecture industry. A few weeks ago, I went to a kitchen design store. A salesman created a 3D model of a kitchen within an hour. After that, he immediately brought me to a VR room where I was ready to immerse myself in my future kitchen. I was able to judge if I had enough space to move freely, to check if the induction cooktop is too

close to the fridge or to the sink. It was impressive. This VR exploration, already a part of their sales workflow, makes the decision-making much easier. It’s not a technology reserved only for technical people anymore. It’s being integrated into Unreal so when can we expect to see it in Twinmotion? Also, how will real time ray tracing change design viz as well know it?

A: We are working closely with Epic Games to integrate RTX technology in Twinmotion, which we expect to have by the next release in Summer 2019. We’ll do several previews before the release at different events. We hope to meet many AEC Magazine readers at these previews! Until the arrival of RTX real-time ray tracing, there are mainly two ways to simulate reflections in real-time. Each has their limits. One is “Screen space reflection”: the elements behind the camera won’t be present in the reflection. The other one is “Sphere reflection capture.” Since it’s a capture, the reflection is only simulated for one point of view. It is not dynamic and up-to-date for every angle.

Thanks to RTX real-time ray tracing, architects will have a true reflection in every point of view inside their project in real-time. This is big progress for real-time arch viz.

Free resources for arch viz projects: part 1

In the first of a two part article, Enscape’s Helen Reinold recommends the best places to pick up free elements that will bring your architectural project to life — from furniture and skyboxes to textures and everything in between

You’ve probably seen it before, that rendering that at first glance fools you into thinking it is a photograph of an actual room or building. Just by viewing your project in Enscape, you can achieve fantastic results, but how do you take your project to the next level, to amaze your clients with the authenticity and atmosphere of the scene? As beautiful as your building is, you’ll be hard pressed to inspire your client’s imagination if all the rooms are empty.

Choosing this content can be overwhelming, simply because there are so many different sources. And acquiring the content can get expensive, especially if you need a lot of it. But if you know where to look, the right elements don’t have to cost an arm and a leg – in fact, they don’t have to cost anything at all! This article will summarize some of the best sources out there for free elements to add to your architectural project: from furniture and skyboxes to textures, and everything in between! Create an emotional experience for your clients without breaking the bank!

■ enscape3d.com

‘‘ If you know where to look, the right elements don’t have to cost an arm and a leg — in fact, they don’t have to cost anything at all! ’’

1 A living room and kitchen area without any applied textures 2 The same space with five textures applied to the walls and floor

●1 Free textures

The right textures can take your rendering from lifelike to astounding. And there are a lot of resources out there where you can find high quality, free textures that will take your model to the next level. Let’s take a look at some of my favourites.

Why textures are important to architectural design: Let’s take a look at what these textures can do. The ground floor of this beautiful Revit project already catches the eye, but free textures can make it pop even more. I downloaded just four free textures from the following websites, a wood floor, a plaster texture, a wallpaper and some tiles, and quickly applied them. Take a look at the results: in just a few minutes, the project already looks much more inviting! Applying textures, in this case especially the wood floor texture, gives the room a more authentic feel. And the tile backsplash in the kitchen livens the scene up immediately.

1) CC0 Textures (cc0textures.com) Revit, SketchUp, Rhino, ArchiCAD At the top of the list is CC0 Textures. All of the available textures and maps are licensed under the Creative Commons CC0 License, so you can use them however you like, even commercially. The textures are available at high resolutions, many with sizes of up to 8,192px, allowing for detailed surfaces.

2) 3D Textures (3dtextures.me) Revit, SketchUp, Rhino, ArchiCAD 3D Textures is the website of João Paulo, a freelance designer and 3D artist from Portugal. He offers free seamless textures with diffuse, normal, displacement, occlusion, specularity and roughness maps. The quality is great, and you have the option to download all of the maps together in a ZIP file, or just download the one you need.

3) 3DXO (3dxo.com) Revit, SketchUp, Rhino, ArchiCAD 3DXO has around 600 free textures to choose from. The website is incredibly easy to navigate: find what you are looking for through a keyword search, or browse the extensive categories list. With one click you can download a ZIP file containing diffuse, bump and specular maps.

4) Poliigon (poliigon.com) Revit, SketchUp, Rhino, ArchiCAD The vast majority of the textures at Poliigon.com are paid for; in fact, there are only 54 textures available free of charge. However, the textures on the site are high quality and spread across a wide range of categories. You need to register an account to download the free textures, but it’s relatively painless when you consider how nice the textures are.

5) Textures.com Revit, SketchUp, Rhino, ArchiCAD Textures.com has a huge selection of textures across a wide variety of categories. The only drawback here is that you have to register an account to download the textures, and you are restricted as to how many you can download per day. When you have registered your account, you receive 15 credits every 24 hours, and with these credits you can download small and medium sized images. Every night at midnight, your credit number resets itself to 15.

6) ArtchViz (tinyurl.com/ArtchViz) Revit, SketchUp, Rhino, ArchiCAD ArtchViz has around 200 textures available on its Facebook page for free download. There’s mainly wood, marble and flooring textures, but they are high quality, seamless images. Additionally, the company frequently updates its page with new textures. You do have to have to be logged in to a Facebook account to download the textures, but beyond that there is no additional sign-up required.

●2 Entourage and Accessories

3D models, entourage elements and RPCs are invaluable for creating realistic renderings, and they will take your projects to the next level. This covers everything from plants to trees, knick-knacks, furniture, people and everything in between. Your project will impress based on its architectural beauty alone, but when you add these extra elements, your clients will really be able to see themselves in the scenes!

Why entourage and accessories are important to architectural design Let’s use the above resources to keep developing our Revit model. It can take a little work to find the right elements to add to your space, but if you invest the time, you can enrich your model and your client’s experience immeasurably! In the below pictures, I have added some furniture to the model to make it more realistic.

Furniture already transforms the space, but what really elevates a scene are the little things that make up daily life — the glasses and books and vases that make a space look lived in: entourage. It is important to take a little time and care when placing your entourage. Try to skew and rotate the objects to make them look more natural; almost no one lives in a home that is always perfectly in order!

1) SketchUp 3D Warehouse 3dwarehouse.sketchup.com SketchUp, Rhino, ArchiCAD The SketchUp 3D Warehouse almost doesn’t need to be mentioned here, as it is already so well known. It houses an enormous library of free content, with varying quality.

A lot of users complain that overall, the quality of the models in the Warehouse is not high enough, however I have had a lot of success by searching for collections, instead of models. I also wanted to emphasize that Rhino and ArchiCAD users can also download and use the models from the 3D Warehouse! Both Rhino and ArchiCAD support .skp files. You will find a little bit of everything here: furniture, cars, light fixtures and much more!

2) ArchiBase Planet archibaseplanet.com SketchUp, Rhino, ArchiCAD I have to say right at the beginning that archibaseplanet.com is not the most appealing website you will ever see, design-wise. However, this is something I can personally get over pretty quickly, as the amount of free, quality models is just amazing. Sure, there are a lot of banner ads, but the categories are easy to navigate and each category has hundreds of models to choose from. There’s almost 300 models in the fireplace category alone. Best of all, you don’t have to register to download the models!

3) Cgtrader (Cgtrader.com) Revit, SketchUp, Rhino, ArchiCAD Cgtrader.com is a bit of a mixed bag. On one hand, there are hundreds, if not thousands of lovely 3D models available for free. You have to register an account to download them, but after that you can choose from up to 10 different file formats and download the models with one click. On the other hand, you can’t filter out the paid models. If you search a category or keyword, you can check the box for “Free”, but you will still

see models that require you to pay. For example, I searched for free plant models, and only 15 of the 30 shown options were actually free. But if you can get over this, you will find nice, high quality models!

4) pCon.box (box.pcon-solutions.com) SketchUp, Rhino, ArchiCAD This website is quite possibly one of my favourites on the list, simply because it is just a really slick tool. You will find brand-specific 3D models of mostly office furniture. You don’t have to sign-up an account to view and download the models. The very cool thing about pCon.box is that you can immediately view and adjust the model in a 3D modelling space. Not only that, but you can immediately customise your models to the fabric and materials you want to use. And, you can add multiple 3D models to the modelling space, arrange them how you would like, and export them as a group.

5) Bimobject (bimobject.com) Revit, SketchUp, Rhino, ArchiCAD If you are looking for manufacturer-specific BIM models, look no further than bimobject.com. There are models from over 1,000 brands, organised in a pretty smooth category system. You can navigate by object type, brand, or even file type. You do have to register an account to download anything, but this is a small price to pay for the amount of quality models made available. And even better, bimobject has apps available for SketchUp, Revit and ArchiCAD, which are free to download and use, so you don’t 3 have to manually download the models from the website: you can drag and drop them right into your project!

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6) Modlar (modlar.com) Revit, SketchUp, Rhino, ArchiCAD Modlar.com is another website that provides manufacturer-specific 3D models, free of charge. You do have to register an account, or log in using your Google, Facebook or LinkedIn account. You can browse models by category, brand or project type (residential or commercial). What is particularly cool about Modlar is that you can save, or essentially bookmark, 3D models to download later. Not all models are available in all file types, so sometimes you have to search a bit to find what you are looking for; however, even if your desired model isn’t available for your CAD software, there are plenty of great alternatives.

7) RevitCity (revitcity.com) Revit RevitCity.com is similar to the SketchUp 3D Warehouse, in that the content is usergenerated and therefore the quality can be hit or miss. On the other hand, the amount of content specifically for Revit is overwhelming and there are some cool features, like being able to comment on models and start conversations with other users. You can also rate the models. To download, comment or rate, you have to register a free account.

3 A living room and kitchen area without any applied textures 4 The same space with five textures applied to the walls and floor

Find us on stand E68 at Digital Construction Week!

●3 3D people

Adding 3D people to your scene can really be the icing on the cake, especially in still renderings. Your office might be perfectly decorated, but until there are workers milling about, the scene lacks that certain something. Transform your scene from one your client likes, to one they can imagine themselves in. Finding quality 3D people can be challenging, so check out some of the sources below as a jumping off-point.

Why 3D people are important to architectural design One last step is to add some 3D people to the scene. I just quickly copied and pasted some characters out of the Enscape RPC sample project, and check out the results! Carefully consider which people models to add to your project. In the best case scenario, you want it to look like they are interacting with your scene, not just dropped into it. To maximise this effect, look for models that are naturally placed, for example, holding a phone or taking a step. 1) 3D Warehouse / Archibase Planet SketchUp, Rhino, ArchiCAD To repeat two of the websites named in the Entourage and Accessories section, the SketchUp 3D Warehouse (3dwarehouse. sketchup.com) and Archibase Planet (archibaseplanet.com) both have a number of people models available, though in both cases, you might have to search a bit until you find the right, high quality ones.

2) RenderPeople renderpeople.com/free-3d-people SketchUp, Rhino, ArchiCAD Render people mainly offers paid 3D people, but have also made several test models available for download. They are available in a variety of file formats that will cover SketchUp, ArchiCAD and Rhino users.

3) Human Alloy humanalloy.com/free-3d-people SketchUp, Rhino, ArchiCAD Human Alloy also offers mainly paid content, but the site has made a couple of

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its models available free of charge in a variety of file formats. You do have to sign up for a free account.

4) RPC Content for Revit If you are looking for free, high quality RPC content for Revit, specifically for 3D people, you might be looking for a while. There are few free resources that reach the quality of Archvision. You can, however, try out a free RPC Entourage Starter Pack (tinyurl.com/RPC-starter) if you don’t already have an Archvision subscription. Additionally, there are several human models that are shipped with Revit which look great in Enscape; check out my colleague Dan Stine’s blog post about this (tinyurl.com/rpc-content). Or, if you are feeling creative, you can follow Dan’s instructions at tinyurl.com/rpc-practice and create your own RPC content. Maybe the quickest way to add RPCs to your Revit model is to use our free RPC test project (enscape3d.com/free-sample-projects). It has a selection of ten 3D people to choose from.

5 6 Placing RPCs transforms this from an empty house to a family affair

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In the next edition...

In the November / December 2018 edition, Enscape’s Helen Reinold will pick up where she left off, sharing her top free resources for IES Lights, Trees and Vegetation, Skyboxes and Sound Files, as well as some tips on how to manage all of your resources.