March 11, 2020

Twinmotion 2020 delivers new levels of realism and much more


We’re excited to announce that Twinmotion 2020.1 is now available! It’s packed with new features that help turn your CAD and BIM models into even more convincing visualizations and immersive experiences in just a few clicks, and provide new options for presentation and review.

Enhanced lighting and rendering

Right out of the box, you’ll notice a higher-quality look to your scenes, thanks to an entirely reworked lighting and shadowing system that features a new screen-space global illumination (SSGI) method for indirect lighting and better baseline settings to more closely match physical lights.

For exterior scenes, there’s a new physically based atmospheric sun and sky, offering more realistic skies that accurately reflect different locations, seasons, and times of day—including beautiful sunsets.
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New area and volumetric lighting let you simulate illumination from large surfaces like ceiling panels or windows, and add atmosphere to your scene with fog, mist, dust, or smoke. And the depth of field feature now closely mimics that of a real camera, for cinematic effects. There’s also a new automatic exposure option to provide a better viewing experience when moving from interiors to exteriors and vice versa.
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On the materials front, this release adds a new X-Ray material for viewing occluded objects such as vents and plumbing, a Frosted Glass material, a light-emitting Glow material (courtesy of SSGI), and the ability to add video as a material—perfect for simulating TV screens or flickering fires.
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Enhanced vegetation system

It’s not just lighting that’s received a quality boost. Twinmotion’s vegetation system gets some significant upgrades, starting with a new set of high-resolution tree assets from procedural organic 3D modeller Xfrog. Each tree, which has an order of magnitude more polygons than the previous assets, comes in three different ages and four seasons. To further enhance the realism, the texture resolution of materials has been increased, there’s a new two-sided foliage shader with sub-surface scattering that portrays the effect of light filtering through leaves, and the effects of wind are simulated at the leaf level. 
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Other vegetation assets, including all bushes, have been replaced by high-quality Quixel Megascans assets.

Visualizing how new plantings will develop over time is critical for many architectural and landscape design projects, and in some cases—such as for certain state-funded project bids—is an obligatory requirement. With Twinmotion 2020’s new Growth slider that blends and scales between the three provided tree ages, it’s easy to show how a project will look at delivery, a few years later, and then finally once everything has reached full maturity.

Other new features in this area include a new scattering tool to apply vegetation on selected geometry, more customization options for grass, and improvements to the painting system.
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Higher-fidelity humans

Not to be outdone, Twinmotion’s built-in library of 3D human characters has been replaced with new high-quality photo-scanned assets, enhancing the credibility and ambience of your scene. There are 62 mocap-animated characters, each with five changes of clothing, and a further 82 ready-posed characters, so there’s plenty of variety. All characters are sourced from AXYZ design, who specialize in providing 3D people for archviz. 
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One-click synchronization with Rhino

Twinmotion 2020 sees Rhino added to its list of packages supported by Direct Link, joining SketchUp Pro, Revit, ARCHICAD, and RIKCAD. This enables you to synchronize your Rhino and Grasshopper data into Twinmotion with a single click while retaining organization and hierarchy and automatically substituting native materials with Twinmotion PBR materials. Support has also been updated for SketchUp Pro 2020.
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Project presentation and review

The successor to BIMmotion, the new Twinmotion Presenter enables you to share an individual project in a standalone viewer as a lightweight packaged executable, so clients and stakeholders can review a project without needing to have Twinmotion installed. You can easily create a presentation with multiple points of view and camera paths; the view can be set to free, guided, or locked, enabling you to choose whether viewers can explore at will, see the project only from pre-selected positions, or only play back the animation as rendered, respectively.

When it comes to providing feedback in a design review, or recording non-visual data such as brand names or pricing, the new Note tool is great for making sure information is captured in context. Annotations can be exported to BCF format (IFC standard) in a zip file and loaded into Revit, ARCHICAD, or many other BIM packages, streamlining the iterative process. 

To see all the new features in Twinmotion 2020.1, take a look at the Release Notes. You can also watch our recent webinar on Twinmotion 2020.1 on demand. 

Twinmotion 2020.1 is currently available at a 50% discount price of $249 USD (regional pricing may vary) for a perpetual license. This introductory price includes all subsequent upgrade releases until the end of December 2021. 

As a special thank-you to our early adopters, those who had downloaded the previous Twinmotion release will receive Twinmotion 2020.1 for free; entitlements are automatically added to their accounts, and the software can be accessed through the Epic Games launcher. There’s also a free trial option for those wishing to evaluate the new features before purchasing, and a free educational version for students and teachers.

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