Mac Rendering - TwinMotion early Test

[kylejmarsh]

So I have been looking to enhance my renderings a bit, and have been diving into some of the information about Blender rendering engine. It's really great, but also very complicated stuff and I think eventually I want to get good at Blender because there's just so much you can do with it - modify the meshes, add displacement/bump (battens/stones/etc). But after about a few hours or so I'm still only able to create something like this, which is not a real rendering but shows how powerful the texturing is in Blender - notice how I've added battens to the siding, ribs to the roofing, texture (incorrect texture, but this is just testing out the tool) to the stone:

 

 

OK so as a MAC user there really are only a few options for GPU rendering (the rest are CPU based, just like chief is on the mac). Well I have this sweet GPU so I want to put it to work for me. What other options do I have? Well a while back I downloaded the Unreal Engine and the Twinmotion app, but never really looked too hard at it.

 

Well, I should have.

 

This thing is awesome. You get textures, grasses, skylines, depth of field, normal/bump mapping (no true displacement like Blender, that's the only issue with it, but the bump mapping is pretty convincing) - you get people, etc etc etc. So here is the best rendering I could come up with in chief as far as normal mapping/bump mapping to show some texture on the board+batten siding, some stone texture, etc. and to render it in a nice lighting:

 

 

I'm finding the chief materials to be a bit hard to work, but if you get the normal maps and bump maps in there they can be pretty convincing too. OK so not bad for chief above. But with about an hour of 'learning' the program and exporting to collada + importing into Twinmotion, and messing with the cameras etc. I was able to come up with this:

 

 

Soft shadows, materias masking, and a lot more. I chunked some of their included plants in there and they look good and cast realistic shadows too. Battens look pretty good. Woodgrain has some texture on the columns.... look close at the stone though, the normal maps are inverted in twinmotion because they use a DirectX normal map with is somehow inverted from the OpenGL normal map.... so still some kinks to work out but I'd say it's pretty exciting.

 

So nothing really to ask but just wanted to share this with everybody - so far my experience using TwinMotion gives me hope for using it in the future. There is currently a trial license you can use unlimited (?) while you try it out.

 

Anybody else using twinmotion? Got tips, materials, example renderings, etc?

[kylejmarsh]

Did I mention that the rendering updates in real time? So I can just paint on some grass, change the time of day, month, north arrow.... yep could become a pretty good time waster lol but I bet I could get some pretty neat rendering out of this software. I will repost when I get a few really good ones...

 

[kylejmarsh]

Update: Twinmotion Interior vs. Chief Interior

 

I realize both are lacking in basic skill and execution, but are useful for comparing basic rendering settings of both. Both are screenshots from the fluid (no wait) rendering - TM operates  much like 'standard' view in chief:

 

 

 

[Seafield]

I read about your experiments with Twinmotion on a MAC with great interest. I have long been interested 

in learning TM as a real time renderer, particularly for larger projects.

 

What holds me back is what you are currently highlighting as its limitation: its sun-sky model is very weak.

It is just not good enough---and most users recognize this.

 

TM is free until the end of the year and since EPIC owns them, I have to think the holy grail: real-time ray-tracing, has to 

come to TM at some time this year before it is no longer free.

 

Light. It is alway about the light---and at the moment my interest is in the renderers that have figured out what the

best light algorithms are to produce it in an authentic dynamic with PBR materials.

[kylejmarsh]

Yeah as an Apple user it's pretty much the only rendering program that can utilize a graphics card, especially my AMD 580 Radeon which has basically been sitting dormant... it kinda kicks on with Chief... but not like this that baby is pegged when I use this program it's kinda nuts.

 

Been playing around with it all afternoon and there's all kind of light settings too - exposure, sky color, background, sun intensity, cloud cover - any setting I could hope for on the exterior. Why did I not get this sooner? 

 

Figured out how to export a proper 'render' and not just a screenshot of the live rendering - lol my grass is out of control! But look at that grass! Beautiful, realistic grass! And I can choose the length, the cut style, the 'dryness' (brown tint)... this is awesome

 

 

 

[Michael_Gia]

19 hours ago, kylejmarsh said:

Anybody else using twinmotion? Got tips, materials, example renderings, etc?

Check out Rabbit Design's videos on Youtube.  

Especially the tips on "decals".

 

 

[kylejmarsh]

Another neat thing I just learned is you get access to all these textures and models on the MegaScan website:

 

https://quixel.com/megascans