Just testing yesterday importing a real estate building project with 0.5Mil polygons and 16k separate meshes (that need to remain individual), converted into fbx coming from BIM format.
Trying to import using Unreal Studio result in 5 hours waiting the import to finish, and next a crash trying to drag the assets in the viewport.
With Twinmotion this result in less than 1 min waiting, and the project immediately available in the viewport.
Being Twinmotion based on UE I was wondering if it’s just the Unreal importer that’s bad, and will be updated with Twinmotion (superior) technology, or there is some tweak I was missing for make it work.
I think Unreal Editor 's importer is very very old code.
It should be remade. Also the Editor has a shiton of extra things loaded at same time so it is way heavier to run, more clunky, tons of more bugs, etc.
What tool were you using to export your BIM data? If Revit, there is a much simpler way using Datasmith and the Revit plug-in we support. If Archicad, you will soon be able to export C4D files and load them with our new C4D importer (4.23). You can also try exporting SketchUp files from Archicad and importing with our current SketchUp plugin.
My input data it’s an ifc file (coming from Revit, but I didn’t have access to the original Revit file). All the projects I will work on will be in ifc file format.
From ifc converted in fbx using PiXYZ (testing it for this purpose since ifc file importer its not available right now in Datasmith).
Strange is Unreal does have the same behavior when I converted the ifc file to obj using another tool.
I was testing the very same file import in Twinmotion and Unigine and both of them didn’t have any problem dealing with it, that’s why I was wondering if UE importer does have problems
The UE4 FBX importer is designed to handle game workflows and it does it well. One of the reasons Datasmith exists is that we did not want to disrupt game pipelines by changing how the FBX importer works. Since FBX is not well supported in AEC/BIM (except for rare cases), we chose to focus on native workflows. Which is why we have IFC support showing up in 4.23 - which will be in previews in 6 weeks. You’ll then get all the Datasmith love - automated lightmaps, UVs etc. Also, the importers for Twinmotion and UE4 are completely different code, so there isn’t anything common between them at the code level.
I know AEC FBX files that do load fine in UE4, so it is more likely something specific related to what is in your file. You can log a support request and submit your file if you want. Most likely IFC in 4.23 is the answer.
Will the assets contained within Twinmotion be release for use in the Engine? Kind of like a starter content for enterprise?
Yes we’re working on that… anything specific that you find especially interesting?
Hello,
Anything specific…
I need a very simply tool (it’s an existing tool in Tekla BimSight : “Add Clip Plane”). 1 clic = 1 clip plane.
This tool adds a clip plane in the model view, just snaping a face to see the orientation of the clip plane, after you can to move the clip plane.
In my work of BIM Coordinator, I often need to create and erase this clip planes to see clashs.
This tool is existing in twinmotion (section cube) but in the form of cube and every face is configurable… too complex for me and mainly too time-consuming.
Is it possible to create this tool with BP ?
Thx
HI there , yes it is possible.
Maybe you would be interested in taking a look at this post: https://answers.unrealengine.com/questions/49899/view.html
it could be unbelievably cool to able to export a scene from twinmotion to unreal, using twinmotion for fast prototyping and then programming and stuff in unreal.
Just saw yesterday the last keynote of Graphisoft about AC23. It looks like things are moving in the right way for this point.
Any confirmation, PfBreton 
?
I would love to create an environment for a short film I am making and export to unreal project. Is this development planned?
The ability to load a TM model in Unreal is definitively something that is logical and we want to be able to do that. We can’t make promises as to when this will be available as this represents significant technical challenges: Twinmotion is a “game” that is compiled and ingesting this data into the Unreal Editor is not something straight forward at this point.
Some of the out of the box libraries of people, trees, vehicles etc would be great to have access to as a content pack. I assume that if its possible to move both ways between unreal and twinmotion in the future that this would make sense?
yes we’re looking at repacking the assets for unreal users
Sorry I don’t get that statement. I mean… you bought Twinmotion, you obviously own the full source code and all its technical specifications, file formats and so on… I mean, it is not that you have to reverse-engineer anything or something like that… So what is limiting you from adapting the source code of Twinmotion to include all of its APIs directly inside Unreal Engine ? Is it really a technical issue or there are still legal issues to be sorted out with parts of the source code that are limiting you ? I mean sometimes even when a Company/Corporation buys another one with all of its assets then some of the products might still have some parts owned by 3rd party businesses the acquired Company had deals with and so those would need to be sorted out … ? If that is not the case then I fail to understand why it is a significant technical challenge… adding all Twinmotion APIs into Unreal Engine and adapting when necessary to make it work properly with all needed conversions would allow UE4 to just open and write to any Twinmotion file then, no?
« So what is limiting you from adapting the source code of Twinmotion to include all of its APIs directly inside Unreal Engine ? »
TM is built on Unreal, exactly like Fortnite or any other app that one can build with Unreal. To bring back a compiled app in the editor we need to work on a « reverse workflow « . This is a technical challenge: lots of data gets tossed always when an app is cooked with Unreal, data that you would expect to see in the Unreal Editor.
Nothing limits us on the legal side, it’s just a ton of work to be able to do this successfully.
Bringing a BIM model to Twinmotion then into Unreal? Ugh… at that point you might as well just learn Unreal and skip Twinmotion all together.
Many firms have employees not interested to learn unreal and want an easy to use product to do quick design explorations, then hand-off to a viz specialist for refinement to make marketing imagery, client presentations etc.
When exporting from TM to UE4 there will always be pros and cons… having the content packs for UE4 (with the path follow classes etc) would be a minimum for migration.
For OUR users & customers of Twinmotion projects (and packaged Presenter files), the value of interoperability would be in “SceneStates”. If this dataset (say JSON) was standardised and exportable from TM then we can interpret that in our application in the editor and runtime. Myself (and probably others) are creating clones of Twinmotion to extend the functionality and package it as our own.