Twinmotion for historical visualization (HistViz)

Development Architectural and Design Visualization
1

My name is Gunnar and I started at begin of this year a historical visualization project “Virtual Osnabrück 1929” (currently non-commercial), which recreates the Neumarkt square in 1929 (=> [Neumarkt (Osnabrück) – Wikipedia], see picture #3 there).

After doing photo research I modelled the principle layout of the square & buildings by Blender. Now I began w/ more detailed house construction (stage #1: facades by photo snippets). I got a tip from friends to use Twinmotion for presentations and animation.

Twinmotion is as I understand a tool, which mainly supports ArchViz projects, but is at least used by the historical “Gamla Varstad” project either.

My expectation is not that EG will expand the TM’s library so that HistViz projects can be implemented as easily as ArchViz projects. My concern is based on the question of whether the use of TM makes it possible to add features that differ from ArchViz with my own extensions with reasonable effort.

  1. I plan to animate an old tram, which drives across the square. TM offers therefore a Custom Path animation. I would like to animate the tram’s turning wheels as well and the same for a few old-fashioned cars and trucks. Can the Custom Path-feature and Animotors be combined by use ?

  2. The pedestrians and cyclists of the TM lib wear all modern clothes afaik. How can these be changed to old-fashioned style ?

  3. A round 45 percent of the traffic was still done by horse, dog and hand carts in 1929. This would require integration of other custom animations at least for horses, cart wheels and draw bars. How could this be integrated w/in TM ?

2

You might be better of using standard Unreal Editor for your project. You can get a lot of historical assets from the market place. It is more like a historical game you are creating than an ArchViz scene. You would need to import EVERYTHING into Twinmotion as all the assets in there are modern. I don’t think that makes sense.

3

THX for your clear answer.

Is there an alternative option: Import Blender stuff as FBX into TwinMotion and then later for full animation go via UE-Bridge ? Will surely cost TM license more but TM assets like plants and textures can be possibly reused inside UE. Limited simulation (tram only) could be promoted earlier. Is this realistic ?

4

Not sure. The twinmotion forum would probably be a better place for that question.

1 Like
5

I think you can do all in UE. But you have to build all the assets outside and then import with Datasmith. Whatever is available in the store, use it. Makes life smother. You can use Poser or DAZ to build your classical folk and then import it. But you have to reduce all the meshes you don’t see and don’t need. Poser polygon count is very huge. There are tools to reduce mesh. Do so with houses and the landscape. I do all work and assemble it in C4D. Datasmith imports all the material and so I have only to tweak it so it works in UE. May work with other programs too in this way. It’s a lot of work before you can use it in UE, but well, it’s your project :wink: