Twinmotion for 23

[Barry Kelly]

Has anyone heard any news as to when the free version of Twinmotion for Archicad 23 is going to be released?
I see the free current version (build 2019.6) availability time has been extended to 'Early 2020'.

Barry.

[Lingwisyer]

rm wrote:
In my opinion, the low cost to get into TM, if you buy it, is because Epic Games knows this is just a paid Beta, that is not ready for prime time!

From my minimal experience with TM, that is also my opinion. My only complaint about the Lumion library is the lack of ability to get usable Australian trees.



Ling.

[Richard Morrison]

I can't believe someone is complaining about the quality of the trees in Twinmotion, which is already far better than anything we've had before, and is FREE, besides.

It reminds me of a joke about two people in a free food line. One says, "This food is terrible." The other responds, "Yeah, and such small portions, too!"

[Bricklyne Clarence]

Something something "Beggars" something something "Choosers"

My only concern with getting into a Twinmotion workflow is doing so with the realization that this (free version situation,(as nice as it is) is a one time deal (only for version 23)
All future versions (assuming for any version later than ArchiCAD version 24 or Twinmotion 2021 or whatever) will be paid versions on top of your ArchiCAD license fee.

So the idea is to get people hooked on the software and workflow and ease-of-use and everything with this free version, and then when time comes for an upgrade (to either the next version of ArchiCAD or TM), you won't be able to resist paying for it just to keep a workflow you're already accustomed to.
Standard operating procedure for new product and brand introduction into a new market for any clever firm.

So really, this is is more accurately a promotional free version, with emphasis on "promotional" (of the Twinmotion brand), and that's fine and everything, just as long as everyone getting excited about it is aware of this reality.

And it works to both companies' mutual benefit, of course.
Epic Games get to tap into a( heretofore untapped) market base with this whole Real-time Raytracing rendering engines that require little expertise, while Graphisoft at least get to put some gloss and shine on an otherwise lackluster version release.

In my personal opinion, most architects will really get into this.
The learning curve and overhead compared to learning and using a more professional render engine (like a Vray or Corona + 3ds Max) or outsourcing to people who can, and the concomitant savings in time, resources and finances will be too hard to resist or turn down.
And anyone capable of affording a Lumion or a more professional solution won't even bother giving this a look and will pay the money for those solutions anyway, so that's a moot point. This is something that most architects will be able to easily dump onto an intern to learn for a couple of days and save themselves (or their clients) those third party high cost rendering fees, so why not?

[Richard Morrison]

The Twinmotion 2020 license (with upgrades) extends at least until Dec. 2021. Given that Epic has had a "creator's license" available for free for the Unreal engine for quite awhile (years) makes me think that their business model isn't really to get people hooked and them stick them for an exorbitant license fee. No one knows what the future will bring, of course, but Epic doesn't strike me as similar to the "Evil Empire."

[rm]

The expectation was set in Las Vegas by GS. We were also promised Ray Tracing in this version. If your happy with this version of the software, by all means use it, but its not what was shown and promised so proudly by GS. As for the previous tree library, it was cartoonish at best. I actually had a client comment on how unrealistic the trees looked especially compared to Lumion.

FREE is not what I am seeking, but GS offered it. Given I pay for multiple SSA licenses, I am happy to try using TM.

The reason TM is now free and won’t be in the future, is because its not done yet. At best, this current version is a paid BETA @ $499. The 2020 update was supposed to be out in Nov. The vast Quixel assets promised to be included are currently not part of TM.

I’m not happy with average presentations, nor are my clients, have at it if you are.

Richard wrote:
I can't believe someone is complaining about the quality of the trees in Twinmotion, which is already far better than anything we've had before, and is FREE, besides.

[Bricklyne Clarence]

Richard wrote:
The Twinmotion 2020 license (with upgrades) extends at least until Dec. 2021. Given that Epic has had a "creator's license" available for free for the Unreal engine for quite awhile (years) makes me think that their business model isn't really to get people hooked and them stick them for an exorbitant license fee. No one knows what the future will bring, of course, but Epic doesn't strike me as similar to the "Evil Empire."

I'm fairly pretty certain the "upgrades" they referred to are 'service upgrades' akin to hotfixes or Service packs rather than full version upgrades.
Given that this release version is actually referred to as Twinmotion 2020.1, I would expect any future upgrades to be in the vein of Twinmotion 2020.2, 2020.3,2020.5......etc...rather than Twinmotion 2021 - which would odd if that's what they were referring to as "upgrades" when the year is just one (2021).

Also as has been mentioned and noted, the current version released is devoid of a lot of features that had been promised, which seems to imply that they released a version that wasn't fully complete ( I imagine they were facing a time-crunch and rather than lose customer/consumer-confidence - given as we are now approaching the second quarter of 2020, and they're releasing a version that had been promised for the last quarter of 2019 - they went ahead and released what they had ready at the time rather than wait to release "a" complete version. And with the aim of completing the unfinished features through service releases.
Again,...fairly common practice nowadays for a lot of software development, with others actually charging you extra for those extra "upgrade" features.

The prevailing theory is that they were having a hard time integrating the Real Time Raytracing (RTX) Engine and that's a large part of what held them back (which boggles the mind because a nondescript Chinese firm was able to easily integrate Real Time Raytracing into their upstart D5 renderer which uses the same Unreal Engine that Twinmotion now uses. But I digress).

Regardless, I wasn't suggesting there was any underhanded motive to them doing all this, in this way.
As I noted, it's fairly common business practice to release a free version of a product you hope to introduce into a fresh market that you're new to, before having priced versions later on - if for no other reason than to raise user awareness of the product (and yes, to get people accustomed and used to using it regularly).

I just tend to get the sense that lot of people here believe that going forward, having a free Twinmotion licence as part of your ArchiCAD license or subscription will be a the norm, when it's clearly not.

I think it's a great tool overall (even in it's "unfinished" form), and would work really well for most people's workflows and needs here, and I would even argue that it's superior to what we currently have out of the box in ArchiCAD in many respects even while it still lacks a lot of professional features.
But then again most people on here don't really want to waste time fussing around with settings and dialogs and whatnots that the professional tools have, so ......

[Laszlo Nagy]

There is a clip on YouTube from GRAPHISOFT about how to get your free Twinmotion 2020:



The first part of the clip is showing new features so if you want to watch only the steps you need to take, watch from 2:20 in the clip.

[Belinda Ercan]

Karl wrote:

Richard wrote:
Also, I thought this was supposed to have real-time raytracing, which it doesn't. Granted, there are many improvements, but I think it was made pretty clear at last year's Las Vegas AIA convention that RT raytracing was going to be there. Nothing from GS on this?

Agree, this seems pretty weird given the promises made and the video shown of what to expect. Equally odd is that there has been no direct email from either Graphisoft or Epic about the availability of 2020 vs the promised features - yet it 2020 is available for download with (very limited) info on the Epic web site.

Re ray tracing in Twinmotion: Real-time ray trace technology for achieving high-quality photorealism is clearly the state-of-the-art technology to go with; implementing this technology into Twinmotion proved to be more limiting than beneficial though, due to many technical reasons. Also, Ray tracing funtionality is currently limited to owners of RTX cards only - we understood that our users might not have this (yet) so instead of using raytracing we drastically improved other areas in Twinmotion (photoscanned library assets, improved Global Illumination, Textures, Reflection probes etc.) which leads to the same/similar goal: achieving photorealism.

[Richard Morrison]

Bercan wrote:
Also, Ray tracing funtionality is currently limited to owners of RTX cards only - we understood that our users might not have this (yet) so instead of using raytracing we drastically improved other areas in Twinmotion (photoscanned library assets, improved Global Illumination, Textures, Reflection probes etc.) which leads to the same/similar goal: achieving photorealism.

I spent many hundreds of dollars on an RTX card last year in anticipation of the Twinmotion release, which was supposed to have been released last year. Now it seems I wasted my money.

[Nuge]

I to am quite disappointed with the release of TM2020 it could have been so much more, this version look very much like a stop gap release to keep the masses happy but i think the visual quality is still very poor and the included "updated" library is quite a let down given all of the talk of how amazing it was going to be, Enscape is still my choice of rendered but they too need to lift their game particularly around allowing users to create their own library objects.

Hopefully Twinmotion have a surprise waiting for us down the line (i hope so for their sake)