Epic Games Announces Twinmotion 2023.1
New and improved UI
It’s time for a makeover! Twinmotion 2023.1 sports a fresh new UI that’s both more pleasing to the eye and more harmonious with other tools in the Epic ecosystem. But perhaps more importantly, it also increases your productivity by bringing previously buried functionality to the surface and reducing the number of clicks it takes to access controls—while remaining as accessible and easy to learn and use as ever.
Environments and backgrounds to fit your project
Why reinvent the wheel? Save time and repetitive work with new templates that offer a range of interior and exterior environments to show off your design. These provide a fast and easy starting point for your visualization, including multiple camera views; simply swap in your asset for the one in the template, and you’re ready to export your media. The initial set of templates includes Day & Night Skies, Display Plinths, Basic Lighting, Worktable, Monochromatic, and On Track.
We’ve also added several new procedural cyclorama assets to simulate curved backdrops used in product shots to make the background seemingly disappear, bringing focus onto the product itself. The width, depth, and height can be adjusted for each asset, as well as the radius of the curves, so you can quickly create the ideal background to match the scale and proportions of your product.
Path Tracer enhancements
Introduced in Twinmotion 2022.1, the Path Tracer enables you to create final-pixel imagery comparable to offline renderings; you can switch between path tracing and real-time rendering with a single click. In this release, enhancements to the Path Tracer include support for decals (including hundreds of high-quality Quixel Megascans) and volumetric fog, as well as improved sky rendering. In addition, transparent objects now render correctly with depth of field.
New and improved materials
This release sees a plethora of new drag-and-drop, physically based materials added to Twinmotion’s already extensive library, as well as enhancements to the base materials.
First up, we’ve added 78 new materials to the Fabric, Leather, Plastic, and Metal categories. Hosted on the cloud, the new materials come with 4K textures, making them suitable for close-up camera views. While originally created for product visualization (they are tagged “prodviz” to make them easy to find), these materials will be useful across a wide range of industries.
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Shifting gears to the automotive visualization industry, we’ve added a new material type with dedicated parameters and features for handling effects specific to car paint, such as Flakes and Orange Peel, enabling you to simulate a wide range of finishes including chameleon and pearlescent paint. There are 34 new materials in this category.
There have been a number of improvements to base materials, which now follow standard PBR workflow and naming conventions. It’s now possible to use either a separate texture or an embedded alpha channel as an Opacity map; there are new Color Correction controls on input textures; the X-ray feature is available on every base material; and the quality of Parallax Offset Mapping is significantly better, without impacting performance.
On top of these general improvements, the Glass base materials now have an option to use the thin translucent shading mode, and texture maps can be added to Base Color, Roughness, Metallic, and Normal channels; there are also new parameters such as Index of Refraction, Iridescence, and Imperfections. These enhancements enable you to simulate a wide range of materials such as glass that casts colored shadows when path traced, together with polychromatic, sandblasted, and frosted glass. Twenty-two new materials have been added to the Glass material library as a result.
New ready-posed humans and standard assets
Our built-in asset library is constantly expanding! Since 2022.2, we’ve added over 300 new ready-posed humans in categories such as Summer, Business, Construction, Travel, and University, and nearly a thousand standard assets in Backyard, Sport Equipment, Storage, Decoration, Bathroom, Office, and Healthcare categories—making it easy to populate a wider range of scenes with appropriate, high-quality, ready-made drag-and-drop assets.
Twinmotion Datasmith file exporter
The ability to take your project from Twinmotion to Unreal Engine, where you can add custom interactions and advanced animations, is one of Twinmotion’s many strengths. In this release, we’re replacing the Twinmotion Datasmith Importer Plugin for Unreal Engine with a built-in Twinmotion Datasmith file exporter; this enables you to export your project from Twinmotion—including materials, static meshes, and textures—in a format that Unreal Engine can understand, helping ensure materials are properly applied to assets that are from the cloud. There’s also a much smaller Datasmith Twinmotion Content for Unreal Engine Plugin that makes for improved download speeds and minimized Unreal Engine project sizes.
Optimized Twinmotion file format
The Twinmotion file format has been modified in a number of ways: identical meshes and textures in a project can be detected and duplication avoided in the save file; scenes are saved with multithreaded compression on multi-core hardware; and HDRI files are now considerably compressed and embedded in Twinmotion files. These changes have a positive impact on file size, scene saving and loading times, and global performance.
Improved viewport display
Twinmotion now uses Temporal Super Resolution (TSR) to upsample the viewport display, resulting in higher-quality viewport rendering than in previous versions with no impact on performance.
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