Twinmotion 2024.1 Preview 1 from Epic Games has been released

Twinmotion, developed by the visualization studio KA-RA, was designed to assist architects with limited experience in 3D to create still or animated visualizations of buildings. The software imports hero models in various standard 3D file formats or through interactive links to CAD software. Users can create background environments from a library of standard assets and set up lighting. Atmospheric parameters, including clouds, rain, and snow, as well as ambient lighting depending on geographical location and time of day, can be adjusted using sliders. The software is now available for free to independent artists and studios earning less than one million dollars per year, following Epic Games' recent changes to its pricing.

Twinmotion 2024.1 is supported by Unreal Engine 5.4, the latest version of the game engine and real-time renderer, and utilizes some of its new features. Like in Unreal Engine itself, Twinmotion now features a Render Layers system, facilitating integration with layer-based compositing workflows in VFX and visualization. Users can select objects in the scene, assign them an identification number, and render them as separate render passes or as ID masks, providing greater flexibility in creating the final output.
Work on this feature is ongoing, and currently, it is only available for still images and image sequences. Among other known limitations are the lack of support for fog, weather effects, and transparent objects, as well as the fact that objects do not affect reflections and lighting of objects in other layers.
To populate scenes in Twinmotion 2024.1, two new scattering tools have been added: Spacing and Area. They distribute objects in the scene along user-defined paths and within user-defined areas, respectively, but currently only work with horizontal surfaces and do not support rigged characters.

The update streamlines the material workflow, reducing the number of clicks required to add a new material to the scene, introduces a new material type called Foliage, and updates the Fabric material. The Foliage material makes plants respond to Twinmotion's seasonal settings, automatically changing the color of leaves for deciduous species.
The existing Fabric material has received new Standard and Thin modes for opaque and semi-transparent fabrics, as well as a wider selection of ready-made material types. Additionally, there is now the ability to assign ambient occlusion textures to materials to compensate for the lack of accurate shading in real-time rendering in Standard and Lumen rendering modes.
Twinmotion 2024.1 also introduces new Filmback settings for cameras, mirroring the properties of real cameras, including focal length, depth of field, and aspect ratio. The Bloom, lens flare, and lens dirt settings are now grouped under the Camera tab in the Ambience panel.

Animators now have a new media type called Sequence, allowing them to combine camera movements or animations from imported files into animation sequences and export them as videos. Additionally, a new camera type called Action Cam has been introduced for sequences, providing users with more control over camera movement, including speed and trajectory. Other changes include the ability to create parent Animators in the scene graph to create more complex animations.
Characters and vehicles from the asset library can now be animated deterministically, with Twinmotion generating identical animations when reusing parameters.

Twinmotion 2024.1 is available for Windows 10 and above and macOS 12.5 and above. Integration plugins are available for CAD and DCC applications, including 3ds Max 2017 and above, Modo 16.0 and above, and SketchUp Pro 2019 and above. The software is free for users with gross annual revenue of less than one million dollars. The free version does not include access to the Twinmotion Cloud collaborative platform, but otherwise, it is fully functional. For larger studios, the subscription costs $445 per seat per year.