Friday, December 15th, 2017 Posted by Jim Thacker

Abvent releases Twinmotion 2018 v2


Originally posted on 14 June 2017. Scroll down for news of the Twinmotion 2018 v2 update.

Abvent has begun posting teasers for Twinmotion 2018, the next update to its real-time visualisation tool. Features include a new core architecture powered by Unreal Engine and live links to Revit and ArchiCAD.

An intuitive real-time visualisation tool for architectural professionals
Originally created by French architectural visualisation studio KA-RA, Twinmotion is now developed in partnership with Artlantis creator Abvent, which released Twinmotion 2015 and 2016.

Intended as an easy way for architectural professionals to create photorealistic visualisations of buildings, the software imports models in a standard range of 3D file formats, including FBX, DWG and DAE.

Users can create background environments from a library of stock models and textures, and assign lights.

Atmospheric properties – including clouds, rain and snow, and ambient lighting based on geographical location and time of day – can be adjusted via slider-based controls.

There are also brush-based systems for editing topography or adding animatiable vegetation to a scene, and a Bezier-based system for pathing animated crowds or traffic.

The software also includes a basic camera editor and a set of standard post-process effects.

New in TwinMotion 2018: powered by Unreal Engine, live links to Revit and ArchiCAD
To that, TwinMotion 2018 adds new live-linking plugins synchronising the software with Revit and ArchiCAD. Changes made to the CAD design are automatically propagated to the visualisation.

But the big news – at least, the most visually appealing – is that the software is now powered by UE4.

The video at the top of the story is essentially a showcase of the kind of visual quality achieveable in Unreal Engine itself, and includes work by Koola and Factory Fifteen.

The update will also introduce a new Mac version. Two further feature reveals will follow on 20 and 27 June.



Updated 27 June: The final two teasers are out, although they don’t add much new information.

The fourth video confirmed that Twinmotion 2018 will be available for Mac as well as Windows; while the fifth (above) is an overall summary, although it provides a good overview of Twinmotion workflow.



Updated 2 August: Twinmotion 2018 is now shipping. As well as the features listed above, the release introduces an automatic viewport quality system.

The system, which is user-customisable, adjusts viewport resolution, anti-aliasing and post effects to match the GPU in your machine, helping to smooth out scene navigation even on low-end systems.



Updated 14 December 2017: Abvent has just released Twinmotion 2018 v2, a further update that adds support for Oculus Touch and HTC Vive controllers, for navigating visualisations in virtual reality mode.

The update also introduces Overdraw mode for boosting the visual quality of renders, particularly reflections, at the cost of increased GPU and memory use – now monitorable via a new statistics panel.

Other changes include Auto Save and Incremental Save options, new environment lighting controls, and compatibility with sister application Artlantis 6.5.

There is also a long list of smaller features and bugfixes, which you can find in the release notes.

Pricing and availability
Twinmotion 2018 v2 is available for 64-bit Windows 7+ and Mac OS X 10.11+. It costs €1,650 (around $1,950) for a single licence. The price of a team licence has risen by €500, to €2,950 ($3,490).

Read more about the new features in Twinmotion 2018 v2 on Abvent’s website