Revit & Unreal Engine Twinmotion

I’d read about this a while back and wanted to try it. You export a model from Revit to Unreal Engine’s free version of TwinMotion and render it a lot more realistically.

I’d played with Unity and I really liked its 1st person shooter plugin for Revit, where you created a stand alone model that you could walk throuh and explore. You could pss it on to clients to play with.

This has a higher quality render capacity so I’m keen to give it a whrl. I’ve downloaded the free version (non commercial) to try it out.

I was a bit confused with the install/setup so followed this video by Nico G which I found very helpful (thank you Nico):

The one change is I couldn’t find the Revit link Add-in in the Revit App Store, but found a download on the Unreal Engine Website. I installed that.

For a first play I’m going to send the Revit Domestic Test model across to Twinmotion, linking, rather than exporting from Revit, just to see what comes across.

The download of Twinmotion is a bit odd, but I have it up and running. The opening screen is useful:

And the lionk to the tutorials on YouTube are good, cut into very short videos of specific actions, this is a good idea as you only need to watch the one of specific interest to you at the time you are having difficulties

I played with the materials library and figured how to do basic moving within the exported model. Then I tried to export Image & Panorama. There were people in the view I didn’t put them there and have not figured out how to move them yet.

The image came out at a reasonable resolution :

But the panorama was pretty disappointing. It was at 4K resolution and quite grainy. There was an 8K resolution but I presume that is for the paid version, as I couldn’t select that option. I was using my browser to view this file with http://panoramaviewer.1bestlink.net/ for uploading a panorama image.

There is a twinmotion shortcut sheet here:

I’ve got a programme that uses my middle mouse wheel so its hard to use as orbit to get to the view I want. For the present I’ve turned it off.

I’ve got a big model and I’m working on a laptop with 16GB of RAM and its struggling. Still, I’ll perservere.

End comment

A pretty powerful tool. It has a few features that I have not explored in depth. A bit like Blender, very powerful but a bit of a learning curve to get something good out of it. Great that there is a free version to learn on.

I have found it difficult to navigate, specially orbiting around the model, but that is because my Quick Access Popup wouldn’t recognise the window of Twinmotion as something to be turned off in. The middle mouse Zoom in/out was sluggish then the Orbit would go very fast, so the controls speeds were variable and I couldn’t figure out how to do a zoom all to get back to a preset view. When I did go to back to a previus scene all my subsequent work had disappeared. So I was not progressing very far.

Sluggish on my laptop, especially for bigger models that I wanted to work on. Overall what I’ve produced so far is OK, but not that great.

The exports arn’t that high a resolution so thats not too great either.

I wont take it too far at this time.