Epic Games Presents Twinmotion 2023.2 Preview 1

The latest preview of Twinmotion 2023.2, the real-time visualization software powered by Unreal Engine, has been unveiled by Epic Games. Its predecessor, Twinmotion 2023.1, was presented some months ago, and if you've missed it, you can catch up by reading about it here.

Twinmotion was developed by KA-RA, a visualization studio that created a lot of services ranging from architectural design to interactive visualization of projects, and in 2019, Epic Games acquired it. It was designed in order to give a chance to those architects who didn't have much 3D experience to create animated visualizations of buildings.

This software allows users to import hero models using various standard 3D file formats or live links to CAD applications. Also, users have the capability to create background environments using a library of stock assets and assign lights. With slider-based controls, users can adjust atmospheric properties such as clouds, rain, snow, and ambient lighting, which are based on geographical location and time of day.

This year, Twinmotion 2023.2 comes with new updates, the biggest one is that this software has support for Lumen. With its advanced Global Illumination (GI) capabilities, the Lumen system now offers real-time scene lighting that closely resembles the realism achieved by path tracers. Now you also can find options like Standard/Lumen under Render, which is located in the Ambience panel.

The Standard mode utilizes a volumetric approach to ambient lighting, while Lumen takes a surface-based approach, using ray tracing to calculate one light bounce and one reflection bounce. Lumen provides superior render quality but requires more CPU/GPU resources and RAM. It offers a middle ground between the previous real-time rendering option and the more resource-intensive Path Tracer, which delivers even higher render quality.

The next feature is Local Exposure. This feature automatically applies local adjustments to exposure, enhancing the preservation of highlight and shadow details in addition to the existing exposure settings. It's particularly useful for projects with complex high dynamic range scenes, where relying only on the global Exposure setting may result in blown-out highlights and overly dark shadows.

Another feature is a Basic glass material, which is an alternative to the Standard and Colored glass materials. Basic glass offers faster rendering, and should be used for "simple architectural clear glass purposes". 

Also, users can now import assets from Sketchfab, the online model library owned by Epic Games, while retaining the model hierarchy. This update enhances the process and ensures the structure of the models remains intact.

The Twinmotion's free trial was replaced by a new Community Edition. It remains free of charge but goes with watermark outputs and inaccessibility to Twinmotion Cloud. Epic Games announced that Twinmotion 2023.2 Preview 1 is exclusively available in the Community Edition and this will be the new policy for all upcoming preview releases.

In addition to the new features, numerous bugs related to the content, core, interoperability, rendering, tools, UI, and VR were fixed. If you want to learn more about Twinmotion 2023.2, you can visit the official website.

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