Realtime render engines

[pnel77]

Hi guys

We're busy looking at Lumion, Twinmotion and Unreal 4 for realtime animations and virtual reality.
What programs are used and what's the pro's and cons according to you?

Please advise

Thanks

[vlado]

I haven't used any of them personally, but I hear good things about Lumion; lots of people are dabbling with Unreal, but it seems somewhat more complicated to produce high-quality results with it.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Morne]

Depends on what you expect from it Philip. Locally, Twinmotion is heavily marketed. If you want to be able to slap something together very quickly, then Twinmotion or Lumion is your answer. If you want something better looking, then Unreal or Unity is your answer, although those can be a little more technical.

Unity 5.5 came out just a few days ago...

For VR, you don't necessarily need realtime, you can go with pre-rendered stuff for VR and it looks pretty awesome. Realtime has the added benefit of being able to move the camera on a non pre-determined path

[VelvetElvis]

Lumion can get expensive for the package with all of the content. It also doesn't really excel at interior spaces and doesn't work well with complicated scenes. Remember, it has to work on your GPU to really be effective. Twinmotion seems to be the bastard child to Lumion and can't seem to try to distance themselves from them. If I had a choice, I would go Lumion all the way. You can pretty much drag and drop and get okay for most architecture needs quality visuals in very little time.

UE4 and Unity, the big downside is the time it can take to get things in there. The time saved in rendering in "real time" is usually negated by the time it takes to prep assets to go into the engine.

For fast VR, you still can't beat the good ole panos. Yes, they are not sexy and you can't free walk in them. But for 99% of your client's needs, they will get the job done and get it done quickly and effectively.

[sheehan_partners_nm]

If you are a Revit user, I would highly recommend Enscape...all realtime GI, any change done in Revit will reflect in real time there. You can export an .EXE file to share with the clients and so on.
It is not Vray, but the quality is superior to Lumion and friends...

[pnel77]

Very Impressed with Enscape - Thanks sheehan_partners_nm!
So quick to set up, what a awesome design tool.

[sheehan_partners_nm]

Sure thing, we are here to help each other!
Indeed is an excellent tool, and avoiding exporting stuff from a software to another is a huge time saving! It is also cost effective as you only need one license to prepare the scene, and then you distribute the .exe to your client, consultant, engineer and they can play around in realtime...