The integration between Revit and Twinmotion enables highly realistic and interactive 3D visualizations.
In recent years, the quality of 3D graphics and other tools that enable 3D visualization has exploded, leading to greater demand from a variety of industries not necessarily associated with the technology on a regular basis. Of course, not every industry and every company has the ability to become experts in this field, leading to partnerships between organizations that would never have been considered a natural fit even 10 or 20 years ago.
Much of this revolves around the gaming industry, which has been successfully working with ever-evolving levels of 3D graphics for decades, with Epic Games and their Unreal Engine taking center stage. Earlier this year they introduced an integration with Esri and their ArcGIS platform and brought it into the GIS realm. They recently announced an advancement in an ongoing partnership with software company Autodesk, providing their expertise to the AEC industry.
With this new strategic collaboration, users of Autodesk Revit, the BIM software for AEC teams, now have free access to Epic Games’ Twinmotion visualization tool. Autodesk has said that Twinmotion will be available Everyone Revit customers soon as part of an upcoming release of the product. Leveraging this new integration, Revit users can take their plans and designs from the Autodesk platform and easily transfer them into Twinmotion, where they can create highly accurate visualizations of their planned space.
Through Twinmotion, users also have access to the Epic ecosystem, including a recent version of the program capable of rendering images and videos at resolutions up to 64K, as well as a new integration with the Sketchfab modeling platform. You also have access to MetaHuman to easily create digital humans, as well as a huge library of realistic 3D scans from Quixel Megascans, all of which can be inserted into the design.
This type of collaboration has the potential to change the game in terms of visualization for designers of spaces ranging from a single building to much larger scales. Although previously it was certainly possible to see a 3D representation of a potential design, bringing plans developed in Revit into Twinmotion ensures the accuracy of the former, combining hyper-realistic graphics and a large number of potential assets that can be imported into the space from the latter.
Users even have access to RealityScan, which allows them to create their own 3D model if an object isn’t already in the database. Now not only can you see an accurate representation of a new building or complex, but this visualization can be updated to see what it looks like when populated by people, with different plants and trees in the space, different lighting options and even what The room looks at different times of the day with realistic sunlight simulations. All of this will not only improve visualization, but should improve the ability to win bids by presenting these prospects in detail and realistically.
While the ability to represent 2D CAD designs in three dimensions isn’t exactly a new skill for Revit users, this level of customization and visualization takes the tool to a new level for one of the most widely used programs in the AEC design space and planning. These models will also be highly interactive and can be used for everything from still images to animation and even for use in immersive virtual reality (VR) environments. Having this integration as a free benefit saves Revit users $499, the normal Twinmotion price for those in a commercial environment.
This type of partnerships between graphics companies and companies in the AEC space will only become more common as 3D visualization becomes a ubiquitous part of our daily experience, especially as we near full realization of the metaverse. In fact, this won’t be the last collaboration between Epic and Autodesk, who plan to develop similar tools for M&E and manufacturing sectors as well.
Commenting on the partnership, Epic Games Vice President, Unreal Engine Ecosystem Marc Petit said, “We share a common goal with Autodesk to give customers more time to innovate. By leveraging Epic’s ecosystem of real-time 3D tools and libraries, creatives can spend more time bringing their designs to life and less time tripping over complex data and technical workflows.” Amy Bunszel, Executive Vice President of AEC Design at Autodesk, added, “Together with Epic Games, we will expand what is possible. In immersive environments, designers can communicate to their project teams and clients what projects will look and feel like when completed, with unprecedented realism to drive better decisions and outcomes.”
