Hey, what is up, nation?
In this session we're gonna be comparing and contrasting
Twin Motion 2019, and Lumion 9.
Pros, cons and similarities.
So let's get into it!
First off, let's just talk about the barrier to entry
for both of these products.
The prices are similar, the standard edition of Lumion
comes in at $1,705 + tax.
Well, Twinmotion comes in at around $1,900 + tax
So there's about $200 difference there.
There's additional cost for Lumion pro,
which gives you access to more advanced rendering effects.
And the full content library.
There's basically more objects to put into your models.
These added features basically double the price for Twinmotion.
You can pay an extra eleven hundred US dollars
for a two-year privilege card.
Which gives you access to free updates,
priority tech support.
Which kind of makes me wonder
what kind of tech support you're getting, if you're not paying for that.
And cloud storage slash sharing for panoramas,
which they call a twin linker.
There's like a secondary software you use for that.
I feel it's necessary also to point out,
that Lumion based product has a
cloud sharing feature for panoramas, called "My Lumion".
It has much fewer bells and whistles than twin linker.
I won't bore you with the recommended
system requirements for each software.
They're comparable with the exception of
Lumion recommending 20 GB of free disk space,
and Twin motion recommending only 5 GB of free disk space.
The biggest maker break item here is that
Lumion isn't available for Mac.
Where Twin motion is.
So if you want to use Lumion on a Mac,
you're gonna have to set up parallels to do whatever
kind of voodoo magic you need to do
to get Windows on that computer.
Features are where we start to divert pass a little bit
between these two software.
So give a fair assessment to each of the features available.
I use an image rendered in v-ray as a control.
And attempted to recreate that image in both software.
First, let's quickly cover the similarities.
Fundamentally, both Lumion and Twin motion are real-time renderers.
Basically, what that means, is what you
see is in the same ballpark as what you get.
Both have libraries of materials and 3D models
Both allow you to render still images, videos and panoramas.
Both allow you to add in animations on top of videos.
Both give you control of the time of day and weather
Both allow you to add in your own lights and customize their color.
Both have additional effects, like smoke, water and fire.
And both have out-of-the-box filters, styles and presets
you can apply to your renders to
help you get your desired end product a little quicker.
Now let's talk about where they diverge.
One of the things I absolutely love about twin motion,
is that the foliage objects are dynamically linked with the seasons.
So just by moving a slider and changing the seasons,
your deciduous trees will change color and lose their leaves.
Or gain their leaves depending on the season.
Lumion has seasonal trees in its library.
But to change them based on the season,
you literally have to swap out the trees.
Some of the objects in Twin motion are almost like nested.
So what you can do, is you can select a character for your render.
And then, change their pose or gesture.
I love this feature as it helps cut down
a lot of the noise in the library.
So you don't have one character in 300 different poses.
You have one character that you can then customize
in your actual display.
There's a really cool feature to paint grass into in motion.
This is a great feature if you're trying to put in something
like a well traversed pathway.
Or maybe some tire tracks, or something.
You can paint or erase the grass as you need it.
And I really like that feature.
If you want to experience full VR,
like walk around the room and look at this thing I made.
VR Twin motion can do that.
The VR available in Lumion is panorama only.
And i don't know if this was just based on the textures,
that i was playing with.
But it seemed like the bump maps in Twin motion were
way better than the ones that I was using in Lumion.
Like it was just getting more volume.
So that's a great thing too.
Especially for this pebble pathway that I was working on.
Lumion has an extensive library of 3D models.
So much so that it can feel like you're scrolling
through menus forever to find what you want.
And for some reason, I have some issue,
that when I use the search feature,
I feel like maybe I missed it when it doesn't show up.
So I end up scrolling through everything anyway.
But maybe that's just me.
In general, I felt like the models and textures in Lumion
were much more crisp than what was available in Twin motion.
Now you can import your own models and textures
in either software.
But if we're comparing both,
what's sort of out of the box is available,
I was really worried about how things were gonna look
when they got closer to the camera.
When I was using Twin motion.
I'm not really sure what to call this, other than the smart text frame.
The actual ground plane is really triangulated.
And when I imported it into twin motion
and applied to texture,
I noticed that that triangulation really showed up.
Where in Lumion it understood that that was one surface,
and really smoothed that out.
So that the texturing was continuous.
I didn't notice that show up in the actual render in Twin motion.
But I did notice that the triangulation showed up in the VR version
You could see that triangulation as clear as day.
One thing that I really wanted to do in Twin motion,
was change the color of the painted grass. But I couldn't.
In Lumion 9 you can, and I think that went a long way.
In this particular study.
Without further ado,
here are my final renderings for both software.
But before I let you know which is which,
pause this video, and let me know
if you like the one on the left, the one on the right better.
In the comments down below.
Okay, have you done that?
So there you go!
Hopefully this video helped.
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And as always, happy hacking!
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