Enscape vs Twinmotion - now 2021

    Dear Forum Community
    I’m new here

    Pls can you compare

    Enscape vs. Twinmotion

    2021 aktual Versions?

    Which one is beter ( Easy to learn /use ) ?
    for arch. interiors and landscape architecture ( garden visualization )

    Picture Visualizations, animations ....
    thx a lot 🙂🙏🙏🙏

    I'm an interiors/interior architecture designer and have only had experience with Enscape. It's been great for quick mock renders for solid quality renders, but don't expect anything close to VRAY or 3DSMax. The speed and export possibilities are awesome. They have an okay asset library, though none of their assets are immediately editable. They've been expanding it though, and adding more vegetation, but unclear to what level of depth, variety, etc. you may need for your scenes. I do know Twinmotion has some interesting timelapse for vegetation growth, life stages of plants, etc. which Enscape doesn't have. Also, I've found Enscape to be relatively easy to learn and use too...


    BUT


    I'm finding myself seriously considering learning more about Twinmotion. The biggest reason is I'm starting to realize how maddening the Enscape lighting systems are. They have the different light types, but they all produce VERY similar results. Example: I have a rectangular light that is still casting an oval glow; the same happens with line lights, as if there is a single light source in the center of the Enscape generated plane/line. I'm getting into some more heavy lighting scenes requiring more realism and Enscape just doesn't seem to be anywhere close to par for generating a truly realistic lighting scheme. In order to acheive the effects that should be happening, you either have to overcompensate with luminous power of your light sources or fidget with the actual render settings (i.e. artificial brightness, exposure, etc.)


    This has been something that's always sort of irked me, but until recently I've been working in more conceptual space proposals vs realistic spaces. But on top of that, Enscape is raising their licensing costs and haven't touched or improved their lighting systems or interface since I started using it over a year and a half ago.


    This may seem like I ragged more on them for what I'm currently unhappy with than what I have been. It's been a godsend for my quick concepting projects, things that don't have to be super tight or accurate. But if you start to wander into realism, the shortfalls become glaringly clear in my opinion. This is not to say Twinmotion is any better, I haven't had the chance to use it yet, but definitely assess what your needs are for your work and workflow.

    Hi man , thx a lot for a long answer :)


    have you seen a flip from Twinmotion to unreal engine ? it can be the choice ... I think ( what I see ) can be a real rival for vray and Arnold in 3dsmax.

    If you have time give a look on it .... and pls write me your opinion.

    thx a lot

    have nice week

    Ondrej

    I used TM a lot, but eventually returned to Enscape.


    Why I used TM earlier?

    -Possiblity to edit terrain

    -Assets


    And why I returned to Enscape:

    -Lost a lot of work with continous crashes, althought TM21 has apparently fixed this

    -Mastering terrain editing in BIM turns out to be a better and more accurate way of visualising real world things than doing it "by hand" in TM

    -Enscape introduced Assets: now I can model my own things

    -Way better render quality, especially indoors

    -No need to play around with mirror boxes or whatever, althought the mirror rendering is pretty horrible

    -Live updated workflow with Revit is superb: being able to see what you model or sketch in real time is a must


    So for me, Enscape is a no brainer.


    But still, Enscape's devs mustn't get too comfy, because the business is blooming; VRAY 5 with it's real time rendering, TM21 and TM22 and UE, and so on..

    I am a Mac user so Twinmotion is the only option so far.

    (Beside Blender Eevee)


    The quality is not photo realistic but not so bad and sufficient for my work or clients.

    But I would prefer Enscape from render quality and GUI of course.


    TM 20 does not work fluidly on my M1 Mini, at least the last update got rid of crashing.

    But when TM 21 will be officially released and may run natively on Apples RM Macs,

    we should compare again.

    Here are my thoughts comparing both Enscape and Twinmotion 21 (I'm using it in Rhino 7):


    Render Quality:

    1. Reflections.
      • Enscape is better, Twinmotion is terrible here, they use some trick that doesn't work at all, but it is in their roadmap to implement better reflection.
      • Mirrors in Enscape aren't very good for certain angles though and, if you have two mirrors facing each other, the reflection of them will be gray. Glass objects are bad for both.
    2. Overall lighting,
      • Enscape is also better, although in Rhino, for artificial lights, it doesn't support IES. Also, area lights have some weird behavior and the inverse square attenuation doesn't work properly.

    Workflow:

    1. Integration
      • Enscape has the best integration. I really enjoy being able to do everything inside rhino, no need to export or manage link and materials in an outside application. Twinmotion uses a direct link but it is not a very seamless experience, specially if you do lots of modifications in the model.
    2. Interface
      • Twinmotion has a nice interface but it is very annoying to navigate thru. For example, to setup a material there is no way to setup everything in one place, you need to go back and forth in multiple levels of interface. It is time consuming and confusing.

    Assets and material:

    1. Assets
      • Enscape has a nice library and the custom asset library is very good (although there is a lot to improve - My suggestions here). Twinmotion is integrating with Quixel and they have a growing, good quality, library of scanned assets. Twinmotion also allows you to add your own asset to a custom library (I didn't test it a lot though). Lumion is by far the best one here.
    2. Materials
      • Twinmotion comes with an ok material library and is integrated with Quixel Megascans which is huge (I use their materials a lot). Enscape has no library. Twinmotion doesn't support parallax. Lumion has the best library and some amazing features like adding dirt, round edges, growing ivy.... (It would be nice to see some of those in Enscape).

    Special features:

    1. Sky simulator - Encape creates a sky with clouds, not great but for some projects it is perfect. Doesn't work for night shots. Don't know how Twinmotion handle this.
    2. Weather - Just like Lumion, Twinmotion simulates the passage of seasons affecting trees, rain, snow. It is not essential for me but it is a nice feature.
    3. Growing Trees - Twinmotion vegetation library allows you to set the age of the trees and it will affect shape and size.
    4. Scatering assets - Twinmotion has a great scattering tool that allows you to paint assets in the terrain surfaces (couldn't figure out how to do it with my custom library though) but it is a great feature.
    5. Animation, paths etc. - Twinmotion allows you to animate things, cars, people,... This is great.


    I am not able to talk about the VR, Collaboration, BIM tools and others because I do not use them.


    Overall I prefer Enscape because it is simpler/easier to use and has better final quality.

    But I believe Twinmotion has a huge potential, they use the Unreal platform that is powerful. They have some features that I don't know how Enscape team would implement.

    I totally agree with your description.


    Quote from alexandrecollaco

    Twinmotion doesn't support parallax.


    What do you mean by parallax ?

    Architectonical Camera ?

    (2 point perspective to avoid distortion of vertical lines is there)



    Quote from alexandrecollaco

    Lumion has the best library and some amazing features like adding dirt, round edges, growing ivy.... (It would be nice to see some of those in Enscape).


    Would be nice to have that in both, Enscape and Twinmotion.



    Overall TM render quality is ok for my render purposes but I would prefer

    Enscapes PBR approach vs TM/Unreal, mostly old school fake workflow with

    fake lights, reflection probes and all such things I thought having left behind

    with the beginning of this Millennium :)


    For me Unreal is a Monster of Software and not the GUI/UX I like to use.

    But there is everything in there for highest quality. Once features like

    raytracing, PBR, .... find their way into TM, TM will also be a great alternative.


    For now I would prefer Enscape on Mac for its physical approach and the

    great Light and Sky System.

    Quote from zoomer

    What do you mean by parallax ?

    Architectonical Camera ?

    (2 point perspective to avoid distortion of vertical lines is there)

    I mean Parallax shading, it is a fake displacement using heightmaps. It will give you the illusion of depth with shadows and occlusion. See the example bellow between normal and parallax.



    Unreal is beautiful and has some amazing features but it is definitely not for my work. You need to build shaders from scratch or rely on third party ones. Last time I tried their RTX integration for refraction was lousy and documentation is also all over the place, sometime it takes hours of work digging in forums to figure out how to solve a simple problem.


    I agree that, with time, TM has a lot of potential if they integrate the unreal quality and improve their workflow.

    I only use Twinmotion when I need to have animated objects and volumetric lights, I find it very unstable and prone to crashing a lot.
    I prefer Enscape render speed and quality otherwise.

    Quote from alexandrecollaco

    I mean Parallax shading, it is a fake displacement using heightmaps.


    Got it.

    Yes that is nice for cheap bump maps to fake some more depth and shadows.


    BTW

    So far avoided Displacement wherever I could because of render times.

    Same for Normal Maps.

    I tried them a few times and also thought they are increasing render time

    but I did not see any advantages.

    But maybe I am wrong with that. Any other experiences and opinions

    They can add a lot more depth than normalmap, but it is good to have a proper heightmap to use. If are using a bump map and turning on displacement it makes no sense.


    It would be goo to mix the displacement to add height + normal small surface details. But Enscape is not there yet.

    Forgot to say, the solution that seems to have the best quality is the D5Render. Haven't tested it a lot though. They seem to be able to reproduce better vegetation, specially far away, better lighting and glass. Also their soft shadows and detail lighting seems better. Unfortunately they don't have a luve sync with R

    Rhino.