Trying to figure out if that’s a good thing (collaboration) or bad thing (less competition), what will happen as a result, etc. It seems that Enscape continues in development as a separate product offering, and a Mac version comes about.
Twinmotion was originally developed by Abvent (producer of ArtLantis) and purchased by Epic Games so it is a totally separate competitor to Enscape.
1 Like
Doh!, right, I’m too sleepy this afternoon to think strait. I think I was confusing Twinmotion with Chaos/V-Ray’s addition of real time rendering in their product. You wonder whether Enscape and V-Ray end up melding in some way, or stay separate and improve each other somehow.
I didn’t know that. I had a copy of ArtLantis years ago with ArchiCAD, but didn’t know the connection.
My guess is that yes, that’s the plan, or at least to compete with TM. I’m not sure the current real-time offering from Vray (vision) has much future. Enscape is far more mature and capable, intégration with Vray as the offline final render kind of makes sens. I think there is a market for that immediacy that real-time offers and is ‘good enough’ for look development etc and then being able to push the same project though the pipeline to high-end offline render is attractive.
There is a kind of parallel with Twinmotion /UE5 with path tracing, and remember Vray is also available within UE.
Vray is not a available for UE5, that’s why Epic are developing thier own Path Tracer.
good to know (not that I was going to use it), makes sense though.
Tossing in my two cents: I’ve been using a Mac for rendering and TBH there are a LOT of inexpensive programs out there.
Twilight, IMHO, is not one of them. Even on a 3.2 GHz 8-Core Intel Xeon W its amazingly slow. I really cannot emphasize enough at how slow it is.
Cheetah 3D is an inexpensive program that is a little quirky, but can give really good results.
Blender which also gives good results with a retro PITA user interface.
My copy of Maya just outdated recently but I don’t recommend it unless you’re a AAA studio.
Twinmotion worked, quite literally out of the box, for me and is VERY fast — and if you are not doing commercial work, it’s free and VERY convenient. One cool aspect is that anything defined as water literally acts like water. Pretty spiffy. However, if you are a commercial outfit (as I am), you’re looking at $499 plus taxes. I did the trial, went, “Spiffy” and let it lapse.
There are a LOT of options.
No doubt the keyboard interface appeals to programmers, but as someone who started out in art, it leaves a lot to be desired. Even Maya has a better, more consistent, UI than Blender.
Whether you consider retro to be better or not I suspect depends on your background and age. I’ve been there, done that, it wasn’t fun the first time.
I use the HeavyPoly UI overhaul, very good for artists, I could not use stoick Blender UI etiher https://www.artstation.com/blogs/liamkeating/2XNO/getting-started-with-modelling-in-blender-and-the-heavypoly-ui-addon
2 Likes
I had heard there was a Maya-Like add-on for Blender but since I had Maya, well, didn’t care 
I’ll have to try it out and see if it is any better.
Ive only used it, here was my progress from only using SketchUp and then my first 8 weeks in Blender: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/oAXJyJ
I will keep using SU but for me just on the Pad.
Just want to add a comment to this thread- I use SU on an Intel Macbook Pro (8 core i9 2.4 GHz, 64GB RAM, 8T SSD) the last one before the M1 was released. I have a large file (35,000 s.f. museum with lots of detailed objects and mapped textures- about a 2 GB file. Moving around in it slows to a crawl. I just use it for planning so I don’t make ray traced renderings with it, but I was curious how much faster the file would work on M1 native SU.
A friend who bought one of the first laptops with the M1 chip did me the favor of loading SU and my museum file to let me test drive it. It was dramatically faster—still get the dreaded rotating color wheel when doing certain operations, but it’s enough of an improvement to get me to make the jump. Will report.
Question: I have read that SU only runs on a single core- i.e. is not optimized for multi-core. Is this still true of the M1 Native version of SU?
Yes, SketchUp like most software we tend to use is heavily weighted towards single threaded operation.
However most CPUs went towards having lots of cores, because typically your computer is running lots of programs all doing lots of different things simultaneously (checking your email, running a virus scan, playing a sound, indexing files, reading a file all at the same time), so having processors that were made of lots of separate processors made a lot of sense.
Fortunately there has been a bit of a paradigm shift over the last few years about this and we are seeing chips that generally function better for Single threaded operations.
The Mac Arm chips have been designed to be better at their single threaded performance, this is mostly where the improvement comes from over the previous generation Macs.
These had processors that were not so good at that, or had to be held back to stop the Mac from melting itself as it got hot 
Yes. It’s very good but only really uses CPU I understand. I do most of my rendering using Chaos Cloud (Low-Medium quality. still gives suberb renders in minutes) so the processor speed is somewhat moot.