LUMION VS TWINMOTION - Landscape Tools and Interface Comparison

what's up guys Justin here with the rendering essentials comm back with another twin motion and lumion video for you so in today's video we're gonna talk a little bit about doing a comparison between lumion and twin motion probably what i'm gonna do is break this video up into multiple parts just so we can really kind of get in depth on this one of the questions I get a lot is which one is better twin motion or lumion and so the answer to that question is that it's complicated depending on what you value so I thought would be better off if I just went through and did a comparison between different features and then you could make the decision for yourself which one's gonna be more important to you so let's go ahead and just jump into it so what I wanted to do is kind of break these programs down into their different parts and pieces and kind of give you an idea of where they're different so you can make the decision for yourself which one you want to use so obviously when you start talking about a rendering program especially a real-time rendering program the first thing you have to consider is the cost and so as of right now this is probably the most lopsided comparison just because if you look at lumion if you go to their buy page you can see how their regular version is around seventeen hundred US dollars and then the pro version which is really the version that you're gonna want because it contains things like real skies and their full content library is gonna run about $3,400 33 96 at the moment and if you click on this button for view specifications you can see the difference between the two so like for example the pro version contains way more objects in their library as well as their complete materials library and real skies and the rain and snow so really a lot of the features that we talked about on this channel so to really get the full experience you kind of need to go with the pro version and so like I said that's gonna run you about thirty four hundred dollars at the moment on the other hand if you go to twin motion site at the moment twin motion is free to download and so there's kind of an asterisk on that just because this version is free to download and they have stated on their website that that in November of 2019 twin motion will become a paid product but at the moment if you download this version as an early adopter you can keep this version for free forever so obviously free is much less expensive than a paid version I do want to know expect this to go paid in November and I would assume and I don't have any facts to back this up but I would assume it'll probably go subscription I don't know that for sure but it seems likely and I again just speculation I would assume at some point lumion might start looking at going to subscription as well but again I don't have any info on that it just seems like it would make sense so from a cost standpoint you can't beat free wear obviously if you buy lumion right now you're definitely paying for a pro piece of software um so that's the first thing to consider is the cost the second thing I want to look at when looking at the difference between lumion and twin motion is the user interface and so we'll go ahead and open up an example model inside of lumion so lumion interface is very I don't want to say stripped-down feeling but it's very open feeling in the sense that most of your different options for editing things is containing this lower left-hand side of your page and everything else kind of stays open inside in your screen to give you almost more of an artistic feel when you're in here working I think this definitely gives you more of an artistic feel when you're working with them flying through these models but I also make it I think that it makes it feel a little bit like it's kind of hard to find some of the options that you're looking for when you're first starting to work with it so but it is very simple and then when you decide to like place different objects or things like that when you click on these then other things pop up inside of your model so like for example if I was to bring a tree in here you bring a tree in just by clicking on the place button and then finding the tree that you're looking for and clicking to place it so from a user interface standpoint it's very open feeling and then by selecting different things you have different things that pop up in your window so things like Advanced Options and other things like that will pop up when you have things selected and then when you deselect things those go away to keep this kind of like open feel in here the other thing real quick that I want to talk about is you move objects around by clicking on these little dots that show up when you click on select or rotate and then you can use this to kind of rotate and move things around and again those options kind of pop up as you select as you select different objects inside of lumion so the other thing that is not contained in lumion is any kind of a any kind of a overall organization structure so you can come in here and select like all of the same object so if there's copies of an object in here you can use the options in here to do that you can also there's a bunch of randomize options and other things that pop up which are really useful but there's no like list of things that are inside your rendering at the moment that you can come in here and select different things in group them and organize um you can put things on different layers and turn those on and off but it can just get a little bit clunky just because there's no way to go through here and find different things in your model you have to use this and click on the little buttons in order to get those things selecting so twin motions user interface is a little bit different it's a little more traditional in the sense that you have kind of a library bar off to the left-hand side of your screen which you can collapse in order to get a bigger view here but you have a library bar on the left hand side of the screen it's just where you adjust things like your vegetation or your materials or things like that you also have a bar at the bottom of the page that will pop up different options for different things depending on what you have selected so like for example if I select a material you'll get kind of a you'll get kind of a menu down at the bottom hand side the bottom part of the page with different options in here and you get something similar with lumion but it'll actually it'll pop up and then go away depending on what you have selected wear it more stays inside of twin motion so it's a little bit different than the way that lumion looks the other thing you have in twin motion that I really like because I really like this list of objects that are in here so you can actually come in here and find different things and then move them around and also kind of organize them based on this list over here so instead of having to make what kind of feel like some arbitrary selections and things like that in lumion you can come in here and find these different things using this outliner function a little bit easier it also allows you to toggle these things on and off really easily so like if I wanted to toggle all this kind of tree for example I could just select them and turn them on and off well that I'm gonna put them on layers or anything like that so I just find this this works a little bit more with the way that I like to keep things organized some people might not like it I do like it just because it kind of fits with the way that I set things up in my 3d models as well so it is nice to be able to have that function of being able to find things in here the other thing I want to talk about real quick is inside of twin motion um in order to move things around or scale them you get this little gizmo thing in here that lets you move thing along things along the different axes and it also contains the ability to rotate different things and things like that I find moving things around in a 3d space to be a lot easier with this particular function just because I can dictate that I only want to move something along this axis or I want to keep them on the same plane or move things up and down from a functionality standpoint it's really not that different from the move function inside of lumion but I find this one a little bit easier to use um just to keep things on different planes and things like that to me I kind of wish they would reduce the size of some of these icons twin motion feels a little more cartoony to me in the sense that all of these icons feel a little bit oversized I mean it feels like there's kind of some wasted space in here and also some of the options feel a little bit stripped down just in the way that they're in this list but again that's just a feeling thing the functions are there it just feels a certain way based on the way that it looks but I would say either one is usable I find it easier to stay organized in twin motion and I find them move tools a little bit easier to use inside of twin motion alright so the other thing I wanted to talk about and compare in this video and then we'll move into some other topics in a future video cuz there's just a lot to cover is I did want to go through the landscaping functions inside of lumion and twin motion kind of show you the difference there so probably what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna move over into a fresh render window in order to do this and I kind of like this Mountains in spring preset so we'll go ahead and use this but I just wanted to talk through some of those functions and kind of what's contained in what they look like give you kind of a comparison between the two so both programs allow you to adjust your landscape with these sculpting tools so they both have very similar sculpting tools that allow you to kind of sculpt the ground and the landscapes and things like that inside of your rendering they both have like flatten functions and other things like that so the actual sculpting itself is fairly similar between the two one interesting difference when we go over into twin motion is you have to bring in kind of a landscape plane in here in order to sculpt that well lumion kind of brings this in is just part of the environment so like in twin motion for example if I was to take a look this right here which you can edit in sculpt is actually a big plane object that's brought in and you can actually turn that there we go you can turn that on and off but that's a plane that's actually being brought into the 3d space but you can see how if I come in here and I click on the sculpt button it's very similar in the sense that you can adjust the intensity and the speed at which the sculpt there's different shapes in here there's definitely some differences it is nice having like a square brush option and things like that but overall they kind of do the same things they both got kind of a smooth or a noise to kind of allow you to randomize this so from just a sculpting standpoint I find them both fairly similar the paint materials are kind of the same way so if you click on the button for paint you can come in here and you can paint different materials on your ground and on your renderings and they're both very similar in the sense that they both allow you four of these material options and you can come in here and you can paint those and you can adjust your brush speed and things like that and these are also customizable so in lumion you've got a list of the different materials that you can come in here and paint with so in twin motion you have very similar options where if you click on the paint terrain for example you basically get these four different options for things that you can apply in here so you can see how I can come in here and I can paint this in the same way you can also adjust the diameter and the scale of these different materials in here as well as the opacity of the brush so if you don't want to paint this quite as strong you can turn that opacity down but you can adjust the materials that are in here by dragging this in you are limited to four landscape materials in twin motion in the same way that you are in lumion so painting the materials is very similar where you start running into differences and I think one of the so where you start running into differences though and I think this is an area where lumion has a huge advantage right now is the ability to add landscape grass to your painted materials and we'll talk a little bit about this in the materials section but lumion has the ability to turn on landscape grass and place this in a 3d space so if I was to fly down here and zoom in and look at this you can see how this is applying grass anywhere that green material has been applied in here and we'll make it a little bit taller and a little Wilder just so you can kind of see what it looks like but you can see how that's actually applying the grass where the material is twin motion does not have that function at the moment so the way that you add grass inside of twin motion is you have to use the nature settings and the vegetation settings and then you can drop the grass in as actual 3d geometry kind of like this and so that works for things like this face where you have wild grass that needs to go on this face but where it gets a little bit frustrating is when you start dealing with things like this corner right here for example where it's more of a landscaped area it's very difficult to set this up where it drops the grass in the right place like in these corners and things like that wherein lumion all you have to do is just apply a material so in this case we're having grass pee on this grass material right here and this will put the landscape grass anywhere where this material has been applied so that's a feature that I hope gets added to twin motion because at the moment it is much easier to place grass based on material location than by actually dropping 3d geometry into the model one other thing that lumion has the twin motion does not in this department is the ability to choose your overall landscape so there's a bunch of different landscape presets that you can use in order to kind of create different looks so like this would be almost like a Utah look with the red rocks or if I was to choose another landscape there's just a whole bunch of different presets that you can select in order to make this look different without having to go through and custom select all of those different landscape materials in here the other thing you can do is you can adjust the kind of rock that goes on these side faces inside of lumion so inside of lumion if something gets above a certain steepness like this right here it applies a rock material and you can adjust that rock material over here to whatever you want so you can change that to a red or a more of a grey rock or something like that we're in twin motion you would have to come in and you would have to actually paint that material on the sides of the faces I do not believe that does that automatically so lumion Zadar settings you set you can set inside of your landscape and you can also apply as a material but you can either turn on an ocean so like this one and an ocean is basically gonna sit in here kind of across your whole model so if I was to move this up for example you can see how this is basically applying that everywhere inside of your model and you can kind of adjust that you so you can bring in an ocean and it's gonna show water basically everywhere where where this water is above the ground level and you can adjust the different colors and things like that one nice thing I like about twin motion or one nice thing that I like about lumion is it allows you to kind of edit the way that the water move and other things like that where you couldn't necessarily where there's a little bit less of that functionality contained inside of a twin motion so twin motion also offers you the option to add an ocean inside of a you're rendering so you can see how I can come in here and in a lot the same way I can adjust the height of the water that's in here as well as the different colors and things like that so you can see how I can apply an ocean across this whole thing and this would kind of work the same way where if you had this would work the same way in the sense that the ocean would show up wherever its above the ground level you can see how the editing ability of that ocean is a little bit more limited in twin motion so you're really kind of limited to these different options and you can't really adjust the way the water moves or anything like that inside of the program itself so if you're trying to add water and you don't want to add an ocean there are a couple different options where you can either apply a water material so like you can apply a water material to a face or an object like let's say probably not the best example but we'll go ahead and apply this to this so you can apply a water material to an object inside of your model kind of like this and I believe you can do the same thing inside of lumion so you can also add what's called a water cube inside of twin motion and that's basically what it sounds like where it's a cube of water that has kind of a volume to it and then you can use the scale tool to kind of adjust that and kind of sit that where it needs to go inside of your rendering so that's how you would add water if you didn't want to use the ocean settings we're inside of lumion what you would do is you would add what's called a water plane and so what the water plane is going to do is let's say we wanted to add water into this little of this little corner right here you would just click on the water button and you can just place that water inside of lumion and you can see how you can kind of stretch that and you can move that up and down and you would just move that where it kind of intersects with the face where you want it to be and again that gives you a few different water types that kind of adjust the way that that water looks and it's not really showing up the way that I would like for it to but it's a little bit more editable in my mind inside of a inside of lumion but I would say either one of these would work overall I feel like you get a little more options for the way that the waters gonna look inside of lumion than you do inside of twin motion so that's kind of a high-level overview of those differences I would say in a lot of cases these tools aren't necessarily better or worse they're just different there are programs that have a few more functions than others but I'd love to hear your opinion on which one you like more we're gonna get more into like the object libraries and things like that in future videos but I'd love to hear what you think about the video as well if you like this video please remember to click that like button down below if you're new around here remember to click that subscribe button for new rendering content every week as always thank you so much for taking the time to watch this I really appreciate it not we'll catch you in the next video thanks guys

Channel: The Rendering Essentials

Views: 30,483

Keywords: rendering tutorials, SketchUp rendering, Vray Rendering, the rendering essentials, therenderingessentials, rendering lessons, photorealistic rendering tutorials, architectural visualization, lumion vs twinmotion, lumion twinmotion, lumion twinmotion comparison, lumion vs twinmotion comparison, lumion twinmotion which is better, lumion twinmotion which to choose, lumion vs twinmotion which is better, lumion better than twinmotion, twinmotion better than lumion

Id: p-R2LqcGRAY

Length: 19min 34sec (1174 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 13 2019