Twinmotion 2024.1 Gets New Render Layers System & Scattering Tools

Twinmotion, Epic Games' real-time visualization software, has been upgraded to Unreal Engine 5.4, enhancing the rendering capabilities of both Lumen and Path Tracer for superior visual quality and employing some of its new features.

Like Unreal Engine, Twinmotion now supports Render Layers, a long-awaited feature enabling the integration of the software with layer-based compositing workflows. Now, you can assign Layer ID information to assets in Twinmotion and export them separately, making it easier to select parts of the image during post-production.

Render Layers are only available when exporting images and image sequences. Exporting Layer IDs for videos is possible only if the export is set to PNG. Some other known limitations include a lack of support for fog and weather effects, which always act as holdouts, while transparent objects don't behave correctly as holdouts.

This Preview also simplified the material creation process in the Materials dock, which previously required several steps to add new material to the scene. Now, once you select the material type, the material is automatically created and added to the Materials dock.

Twinmotion now features a new approach for representing different types of fabrics using two methods – Standard and Thin fabrics. With these, you can create a wide range of textiles commonly found in the industry such as cotton, linen, silk, wool, polyester, and velvet.

Twinmotion 2024.1 Preview introduced two new scattering tools that help you quickly place large amounts of assets along paths or within defined areas.

With the Spacing tool you create paths, and with the Area tool you define specific areas in the scene. Once your paths or areas are defined, they are automatically populated with the assets of your choice. Both of these tools have settings to create organic or systematic placement and can be found in the Populate panel under Place.

Note, that the assets can only be placed on horizontal surfaces and Spacing and Area don't support rigged animated objects.

Additionally, some interface changes have been made to the camera options, ensuring a more consistent placement of settings between the Environment and Camera tabs.

In the Camera tab of the Ambience panel, Filmback settings can now be enabled for precise camera matching of real-world camera profiles in Twinmotion. Selecting a filmback preset applies real-world camera sensor or film frame dimensions, which affect the focal length, depth of field intensity, and image aspect ratio.

A new kind of camera part available only in sequences called the Action cam has been added. With this camera, you can:

• Add camera position keyframes over time
• Incorporate camera movement pauses by creating additional keyframes at the same camera position
• Adjust keyframes in time to speed up or slow down movements
• Retime keyframes automatically for a consistent camera speed with the Smooth speed option in the properties of camera parts
• Preview the path of the camera in the Media preview window

On top of that, some significant conceptual shifts to the animation playback and the creation of camera keyframes have been made with the updated Media preview mode:

• The Cine Camera Actor now exists as an object in the scene when switching to Media preview mode
• This Cine Camera object can be selected and moved in the context of the camera walkthrough
• Scrubbing along the timeline only affects the Cine Camera object and its preview, it does not affect the Viewport
• Keyframes are added to camera parts using the preview position in the Media preview window instead of the Viewport

Twinmotion 2024.1 Preview also features Deterministic Animation, a tool enabling you to create and play identical animation sequences in exported media. For example, if two distinct videos both contain an animation, and both animations were created using the same parameters, the animation sequence in both videos will be identical.

Moreover, it's now possible to combine Animators (Rotators and Translators) in the Scene graph to create more sophisticated animations.

Check out the release notes for details on Twinmotion 2024.1's new features here and join our 80 Level Talent platform and our Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.