I mean, it's an important question for us in our Office to know if we should keep investing our time and effort in Twinmotion or not.
I maybe have to switch to D5 since they have the plugin and new features in Archicad 26 are crucial.
I completely understand, but if you don't mind, what exact new features in 26 are "crucial"? Apart from a redesigned layer window, I haven't seen anything remotely interesting.
The Danish location template for AC26 contains a full package to deliver a design LCA which is a requirement in Denmark from 2023Q1. This is crucial for us. The layer window in all project attributes is a great addition for an interdisciplinary company like mine. The additional feature of custom surfaces in the opening tool will be a great help to detailing facades and other designs. The improved kitchen objects speed up modelling kitchens in our housing projects.
D5 is a great alternative to Twinmotion
Hello,
We are actively working on updating our Datasmith plug-in for ArchiCad 26. We understand that the delay in releasing this plug-in has been an issue for our users. We are taking steps to reduce this delay in the future.
For Unreal Engine 5.0 and 5.1 users, there is a UE 5.1 Preview plug-in available now on the Unreal Engine Datasmith Downloads page. This Preview plug-in supports ArchiCad 26 on Windows. We expect the final version of this plug-in for Windows and Mac to be available with the launch of Unreal 5.1.
For Twinmotion users, this Datasmith plug-in supporting ArchiCad 26 will work with Twinmotion 2023.1 Preview 1 which is expected in the December timeframe (subject to change). Twinmotion 2022.2 and earlier versions are based on UE 4.27 and the latest UE 5.1 Datasmith plug-ins are not compatible.
Until Twinmotion 2023.1 is available, to work with an ArchiCad 26 project, you can either save to a previous ArchiCad version or save to .skp or c4d format and import the model into Twinmotion.
Thank you for your support of our Datasmith integrations and we look forward to your feedback on our latest version.
The Twinmotion Support team
I completely understand and I will make sure to share your feedback with the Development team.
Thank you, Luis
MC
Hi will, Epic Games has reviewed the situation and is actively working on releasing a version of the Datasmith Exporter plugin for Archicad 26 that will work with Twinmotion 2022.2.
Stay tuned as the announcement will be made here, on the community very shortly.
Cheers
MC
Hello Emil and thank you for reaching out.
Indeed, the actual plugin working with Archicad 26 doesn't work with the Apple silicon version.
We are aware of it and the team is actively working on finding a fix.
Thank you
MC
Thank you for the clarification
MC_Jut, I appreciate your response to this issue. As with all my interactions with the Support team, it was extremely clear, informative and transparent. I really appreciate those aspects.
I am also excited by the implications that you, intentionally or not, seem to leak here. You're saying that Twinmotion 2023 will be upgrading to Unreal 5.1, which is really exciting news, I was hoping for that as well.
However, I am disappointed as well, because what this also tells me is that the Twinmotion team looks at ArchiCAD users as an afterthought, customers who can happily wait for 6 months without a directlink between their own BIM projects and Twinmotion. I am completely aware of the alternative suggestion of using ArchiCAD 25 as a stopgag, what I think the Twinmotion team is completely unaware of is how this stopgag is a complete defeat of the whole purpose of a DirectLink for the iterative design process that we have right now.
Luckily for me, we can afford to delay our upgrade to 26 for a couple of months because the changes made in 26 are not that important for our practice (and there's also the fact that the Portuguese version only became available a few weeks ago).
I do worry that this becomes common practice in the future, and that if EPIC's dream of turning everything into Unreal is to become reality, then I would suggest that making a small upgrade of the directlink for a program that had no changes to its 3D pipeline at all is worth the couple of hours it would take to check that no meaningful changes to the code was even necessary to produce this small update.
Again, thank you for your considerate, honest and forthcoming reply.
Thanks for that input. I can see the importance of that template, and as I said, the redesigned layer window is indeed interesting for that interdisciplinary standpoint. We have to deal with a junk load of layers every time engineers of all stripes or topographers interact with our process, and I can only imagine what bigger offices go through.
Thanks for clarifying. Can this be pinned somewhere ? We had to dig to find this info and haven't been getting response from any of the other TW/Epic venues
Thank you for the update. I tried several exports as a workaround and here's what I found -- would appreciate any tips / insights / experiences from others:
- SKP - sometimes won't export (too many polygons even with smaller selection).
- C4D plugin - must own C4D and have it installed.
- 3DS - scale issues, haven't figured out the math yet.
- DAE (collada) - works fine although it's effectively "by material"; applied TM materials disappear upon model refresh.
Let me clarify one doubt: will 2022 owners have a free upgrade for the 2023 full version? Or are we stuck with ArchiCAD 25 only if we want to use software already paid for?
Mc_Jut
Thank you, I see now that Epic has published the new plugin in its homepage and am downloading it now. This is great news.
Kind regards.
Hi again. Today the Apple Silicon version of Archicad 26 has officially been released. I am able to add the bundle of the Twinmotion Datasmith plugin but get the error message "The file is an outdated Add-On that cannot be used with this Archicad version." I hope it will require only a minor update for your programmers.
I've having the same issue with the "outdated Add-On" for silicon 26 ArchiCAD, any update on fix or estimated timeline? Thanks