Twinmotion or Sim. For Mac

[Greggoid]

Just bumping up the wish for a direct synch plugin with a real time renderer for mac based design firms.  Twinmotion seems like the best bet, but an agreement with enscape, lumion, etc... would be marvelous.  We are falling behind the industry reying on VW animations..

[zoomer]

If you watch Enscape's job opportunities,

it looks a bit like they recognized a demand for a Mac version .....

[Tony Kostreski]

1 hour ago, Greggoid said:

Just bumping up the wish for a direct synch plugin with a real time renderer for mac based design firms.  Twinmotion seems like the best bet, but an agreement with enscape, lumion, etc... would be marvelous.  We are falling behind the industry reying on VW animations..

A direct link would be great but have you tried this workflow yet? https://university.vectorworks.net/course/view.php?id=789

Export to Unreal Datasmith was made available in Vectorworks 2021 SP3.

 

[Greggoid]

@Tony Kostreski This is great!  I had not noticed this addition.  It seems promising indeed.  I will give it a go.  The update model function also seems like a step not too far off from direct sync.  Does the datasmith file update recognize only the changed aspects and preserve any texturing you've done in your Twinmotion model up until that point?

[zoomer]

8 minutes ago, Greggoid said:

Does the datasmith file update recognize only the changed aspects and preserve any texturing you've done in your Twinmotion model up until that point?

 

 

That's the plan.

 

(I haven't tested so far)

[Tony Kostreski]

@Greggoid I forgot to mention we made our Roadmap public so follow along 😉 

https://blog.vectorworks.net/roadmap-follow-along-with-the-development-of-vectorworks-design-software

Take a look at what's in development 😉 

[grant_PD]

@zoomer @Greggoid I took the datasmith workflow through it's paces yesterday, fleshing out some changes to an existing project that was already in Twinmotion.  I had an existing 3 sided set in Twinmotion, given to me by a client to add the 4th side to enclose it for 360 shooting.  Since the existing TM project had been textured and tweaked in sketchup prior to bringing it in, I did not have a datasmith reference file for it.  The datasmith exchange has no options to control what goes out, it's everything in the file.  So I made a shuttle file of my adds and proceeded.  The adds came into the TM file no problem, but were out of position.  I moved them into the position, and retextured them.  After receiving notes from the client, I made my changes to the master vw file, resaved the shuttle file, and sent out the datasmith file to TM to update.  Happy to report that my geometry stayed where I moved it, all texture changes made inside TM stayed put, only the changes to the geometry itself were made. 

 

If your end goal is to produce renderings/animations out of TM from Vectorworks, I think that the datasmith workflow is great, and actually better than "send to c4d" (which still chooses to not work on my computers whenever it wants to).  My only reservation about this workflow is that TM is a closed end product.  You cannot export anything out of TM to be worked on in any other software package.  While not a dealbreaker, I do have to tell my clients when we head into TM, that we are committed to it for the duration of the project. 

[Greggoid]

@grant_PD Thank you!  This is such a helpful walkthrough.  I have a week or so of downtime between projects coming up.  I will have to start with a aTwinmotion trial as we do not use it currently, so I want to make sure I have time to commit to it!  Curious if ou have any experience with props in Twinmotion.  I am in the museum design business.  As such, a huge part of our visualizations is graphic work.  I import some as textures and map them...others as props.  See below.  Do you think graphic work would be better done in VW, prior to export, or in Twinmotion?

 

Thanks,

 

Gregg

[grant_PD]

@Greggoid I had mixed success with texture mapping in TM.  All textures are universally scaled and edited in TM, changing the scale of one changes the scale of all.  I also noticed in a previous project that decal mapping was really hard to do.  Really what TM wants is everything complex to be UV mapped somewhere else and to only really work with large building shell style textures (brick/concrete etc) inside the program.  So looking at your really nice renders I would be more inclined to do the texture work in VW and export that, since the uv's easier to deal with.  I have not tried your semi transparent people props in TM, they might be an issue since they are: flat planes with transparency AND alpha channels.  I'd do a test on that before committing.