Not sure if its too far or even possible but have you guys thought of a Twinmotion connection?
TM has been my main rendering software before I discovered Blender, however there are certain things especially large scenes with vegetation where nothing can beat Epic Twinmotion in power and speed.
Yes i know there is Unreal connection but its not the same, especially when talking about fast architectural visualizations.
Not to mention there is already a demand for a workflow between Blender and TM and there is no such streamlined connection available.
I don’t know whether Twinmotion supports third party plugins. AFAIK, they create their own connections and not really open for plugins. But I might be wrong.
Yeah thats what i thought of too, they have that direct link connection with Datasmith.
But they seem to avoid any connections with Blender (both technically and commercially speaking) They even had a brief Unreal Engine connector with Blender but they withdrew it without any explanation.
A Speckle connector could be a competitor a guess but its worth trying and/or asking them at least.
While we gave Blender Foundation $2M+, we didn’t require them to do anything with it. The problem on our end is that to support Blender there is complexity with their licensing model and we can’t have our source code affected by their licensing terms. It really needs a third-party to deal with the issues and provide a binary plug-in for Blender and to maintain it without providing source code (which uses our APIs). That’s my rough understanding. It’s a shame that it hasn’t been sorted by someone. We were definitely hoping the Blender team would address this. Right now, we have glTF as the primary method (depending on what you’re trying to do). I don’t know how well the FBX pathway works, but historically it was designed to import objects and not scenes into UE. Might work better with Twinmotion? I do know people are using Blender/UE, but I don’t know what path they’re using.
I think the best way we could support Twinmotion is to create a custom Datasmith exporter/live link.
This could effectively be a standalone connector (DUI2) that bridges the gap between Speckle and Datamsmith.
This should allow for Speckle → Twinmotion (but of course, no Twinmotion → Speckle).
There are some unknowns that I would need to scope before saying how possible this is, I’ll try and take a look soon.
@kenpimentel Thanks for the unique insight! GLTF is great but nothing compares to a direct connection and I emphasize that I refer to a TM connection, not UE which is already happening in Speckle.
@Jedd That would be awesome if you can begin with this and I can ensure there is a large community interested which will also get into Speckle ecosystem if they havent already.
Do you mean like an additional and optional plugin to enable Datasmith in Speckle Systems for all your connectors or that would only be for Epic ones TM and perhaps UE?
We should check in with our Datasmith dev team around options. We have just added “Autosync” to our Directlink plug-ins. This means that as an upstream change happens in 3ds Max, Revit, SketchUp, Rhino, Vectorworks, the downstream apps update automatically. Now, this only works on a single machine, so different than Speckle, but my point is that Datasmith is evolving and at one point, we were even showing streaming workflows from a source. All of our source code is published around Datasmith and our plug-ins.
I’m not sure I 100% follow what you mean by “all your connectors”
I don’t see value in getting Datasmith data into Speckle, if that’s what you mean, as our current connectors fulfil this purpose. This would also be quite difficult for us to engineer.
However, getting Speckle data into TM via a custom Datasmith exporter may be possible. This would be a separate connector, our other connectors need not be affected.
I would need to look more into the datasmith SDK to say how easy this would be.
Just so we are on the same page, the ultimate goal is to enable workflows like
Revit → Speckle → Twinmotion,
Rhino → Speckle → Twinmotion,
etc.
Correct?
Yes, one way stream into Twinmotion. You basically only need to create one Speckle receiving connector for Twinmotion and then all of the others programs are plugged in, right?
Thanks for your interest, no progress just yet! We’re currently working to improve the existing ones and making workflows across them more stable before we can start to take on new ones.
It would be incredible to add Twinmotion to the plugins available to connect our 3D models, seeing that there is already an option through Unreal Engine, it would be of great help to also have Twinmotion since they are from the same company as EpicGames, and their usefulness for the Architectural visualization is of great importance for many designers
