This software lets you generate perfect virtual worlds, objects and scenes
The real-time visualization tool Twinmotion gives users the ability to generate impressive 3D product photos and even whole worlds.
Powered by the Unreal Engine from Epic Games, Twinmotion was originally designed for use by architects, urban planners and professional designers of all kinds.
Now, however, its powerful tools for rendering just about any object or visualization of a physical space through a simple and intuitive platform are good enough to possibly make product photography obsolete.
Twinmotion’s creators recently demonstrated just how powerful the software is since a 2023 update. They did this by showing off how well it can render whole buildings, fictional landscapes and of course, photorealistic images of shoes, bags, cars and other objects.
The Unreal Engine behind this system lets it integrate features that help the technology along even better. These include the ability to scan an environment for the sake of creating a digital asset.
Another feature of the software is called “Metahumans”, a further program that lets it create photorealistic human faces and bodies.
The 2023 update to Twinmotion has streamlined its user interface for easier navigation by users of all kinds and also includes an update for improved materials and textures for much better object realism.
Twinmotion now also includes enhanced path-tracing abilities, and new industry-specific templates for object and scene renders. It also contains 1000 new virtual assets that users can play around with for their designs.
These templates and materials additions are particularly important for Twinmotion’s usability because they make it much easier than ever before to create photorealistic renderings of products and other objects.
Users can then not only drop the objects they create into a whole range of template backgrounds and scenes but also adjust lighting and even the different tones of sunlight for different seasons.
These updates, combined with UI improvements, let even amateur users leap right into creating cool things for their visual design projects without too much of a learning curve.
As the company explains for some of its texture editing and other additions:
“We’ve added 78 new materials to the Fabric, Leather, Plastic, and Metal categories. Hosted on the cloud, the new materials come with 4K textures, making them suitable for close-up camera views. While originally created for product visualization (they are tagged “prodviz” to make them easy to find), these materials will be useful across a wide range of industries,”
Basically, users can leap right in and with some practice, generate any product or object they like in complete photorealism without taking a single photo of anything.
Some of Twinmotion’s categories include things like an automotive sector, which includes a new method for creating very realistic renderings of cars. These work right down to the visual qualities of certain types of car paint.
These visuals are good enough to be used for advertising, product demo videos and all sorts of commercial applications.
Essentially, a product creator could use Twinmotion to develop a product from scratch to a digital finish. They could take it through different design phases and have a realistic rendering ready for advertising without ever even building any physical thing first.
It’s worth underscoring here that Twinmotion isn’t quite the same thing as something like Midjourney. It doesn’t create visuals just from text prompts and rendering a high-quality object or scene with this software definitely means lots of human editing and tweaking.
However, it does beg major questions for whole photographic industries, and for a possible near future in which even the human editing process can be taken out of the equation.
As for cost, a commercial license to use Twinmotion comes with a one-time cost of $500, but the software is free for students and education professionals.
Commercial photographers may want to worry even more than before at this point.
Image credits: Twinmotion
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Stephan Jukic is a technology and photography journalist and experimental photographer who spends his time living in both Canada and Mexico. He loves cross-cultural street photo exploration and creating fine art photo compositions.
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