3D creation platform, Unreal Engine, and architectural visualisation tool, Twinmotion from Epic Games are breaking down silos and helping data to flow freely through the architectural pipeline
The architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry has a problem that no one is talking about. Bringing an idea from an architect’s imagination to real-world bricks and mortar takes the expertise of a multitude of different disciplines.
Architects, engineers, consultants, suppliers and manufacturers all need to collaborate to reach the finish line. The elephant in the room is that in terms of the data each expert produces, no one on this team speaks the same language.
That’s because the architectural process has not been designed with one single streamlined pipeline in mind. Each discipline is a silo, requiring specialist software that outputs different file types. This results in a myriad of workflows that are effectively isolated.
Lengthy conversion processes are required to move data along. These can produce hit-and-miss results, with important information lost along the way. Effective, stress-free collaboration becomes a pipedream.
What if there was a way to join the dots, so that data could flow freely from one phase of the architectural pipeline to the next?
Epic Games is working on just that. The interactive technology company is developing an ecosystem of tools and asset libraries to help create a more joined-up way of working.
Real-time tools for AEC
Epic’s Unreal Engine has been making waves in the AEC industry for some time. It’s leveraged by visualisation specialists to create photoreal architectural visuals and real-time immersive experiences.
Similarly, Twinmotion has gained favour among architects as the tool of choice for quickly producing high-quality images, animations and even VR experiences.
The two tools are designed to be used at different stages of the architectural pipeline.
Twinmotion has been designed for people who come from a non-CG background, like architects and designers. Anyone can easily pick up the tool and get to grips with it quickly – without having to spend hours learning technical workflows.
Once in Twinmotion, building a scene is a simple case of dragging and dropping lights, materials and props then changing the season and the weather – or even adjusting the growth of trees – by dragging a slider.
From there, it takes seconds to create images, panoramas, standard and immersive 360° videos, VR experiences and shareable lightweight interactive presentations – all from the same scene.
Ten years ago, the story might have stopped there. Most rendering tools up until now have been closed boxes. What they output is often completely unusable in the later stages of design and development. But Epic’s vision is a more connected architectural design pipeline, eliminating frustrating dead ends, miscommunication and the need to redo work in multiple packages.
With that in mind, the company has started to facilitate easier ways to move data between the tools within the Epic family. The Twinmotion to Unreal Engine Importer plugin enables teams to take a scene started in Twinmotion into Unreal Engine to leverage the advanced feature set the engine offers.
That means, all of a sudden, a whole world of possibilities opens up for the scene you’ve created. Everything from digital twins, virtual collaborative platforms, XR experiences, immersive sales configurators, and more are on the table.
Now, an entire ecosystem of third-party tools is also building up around Epic’s technology, unlocking a world of creative options.
A number of companies are developing plugins for Unreal Engine that facilitate the development of digital twins, including Spatial Flow. Its Datasculpt platform can be used for creating digital twins and other live, immersive, data-powered visualisations from IoT data.
Accurate digital twins of real cities – or in the future, even whole countries – will be facilitated through the creation of virtual worlds based on real-world GIS data.
Cesium is a platform for building 3D geospatial applications. It’s developed an open-source plugin that connects Unreal Engine to the Cesium ion SaaS platform for ready-to-use 3D tiles of terrain and 3D buildings, as well as providing pipelines for generating 3D tiles from source data such as terrain, imagery and photogrammetry models.
Similarly, supplier of GIS mapping software Esri has released Vitruvio for Unreal Engine, a plugin that enables Unreal Engine users to generate vast cities and complex buildings within seconds.
Unreal Engine also has a fast-growing number of plugins that enable users to leverage point cloud data from laser scanners. These include an offering from Cintoo, a company at the convergence of laser scanning and digital twins.
Cintoo has a new cloud-client solution under development that will enable mesh-based laser scans to be streamed from the cloud directly into Unreal Engine. The idea is to create rich, immersive experiences that mix as-built scan data with as-designed CAD and BIM models to address QA/QC workflows for construction.
The new architectural pipeline
AEC professionals deserve a break. Struggling to work with tools that don’t play well together is frustrating. Fortunately, it no longer has to be that way. A more open and connected way for the AEC disciplines to work together is becoming possible.
With Epic Games’ real-time tools, plus the wider ecosystem of innovative plugins around them, AEC firms have what they need to build a seamless, open architectural pipeline. You can download Unreal Engine for free, get an unlimited free trial of Twinmotion, and start exploring the plugins available for Unreal Engine in the Unreal Marketplace.
Epic Games
Unreal Engine and Twinmotion
www.unrealengine.com/architecture
Twitter: @Twinmotion
Twitter: @UnrealEngine
LinkedIn: Twinmotion
LinkedIn: Unreal Engine for design visualization
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