Filmmakers, previz teams, and art departments can now use Twinmotion to visualize their ideas instantly without waiting for renders, whether for virtual production or traditional VFX.

A very intuitive and easy to use tool that most people find that they can learn simply by exploring the interface, Twinmotion is for everyone from professional studios to independent freelancers, hobbyists, students, and educators. Free for individuals and companies whose annual gross revenue does not exceed $1 million USD, the tool is already well established in the world of architecture, but designers in other areas have discovered the potential of its real-time capabilities for their own creative projects.

One such example comes from Olli Huttunen, an entrepreneur in the audiovisual sector, based in Finland, that used Twinmotion to complete his first short film made using real-time technology. Having worked as an audiovisual technician on contemporary art exhibitions for the past 15 years, Olli also has a passion for 3D modeling, video editing, and drone-based photography. This led him to achieve international success as a maker of short films.

His short film, Messages, is a montage of the different ways that we try to communicate with each other. Created predominantly in Twinmotion, Olli also turned to Unreal Engine to enhance some of the short’s more complex scenes. Olli first started using Twinmotion when he was looking for a tool to produce spectacular images and animations using real-time graphics. He found the tool’s intuitive interface made it easy to learn and produce new environments quickly.

Olli Huttunen’s film is from 2022… and Twinmotion has evolved a lot since then. In fact, the real-time visualization tool powered by Unreal Engine that enables anyone—from architects and designers to filmmakers and other storytellers—to quickly and easily produce high-quality images, panoramas, standard or 360° VR videos, and interactive presentations from 3D data has now reached version, 2025.1 which is, according to Epic Games, “a bumper release. Whether you’re working in architecture, automotive, consumer products, filmmaking, or beyond, Twinmotion 2025.1 has something new for everyone.”

Training for the Art Department Guild at Sony Pictures

Whatever kind of storyteller you are, Epic Games says, “if your scene includes any element of an outdoor setting, you’ll welcome a slew of enhancements to Twinmotion’s environment features” starting with “the option to use true volumetric clouds in your scene. You can author your clouds’ appearance by adjusting their altitude, coverage, and distribution, and by fine-tuning their density, color, puffiness, and other settings. Volumetric clouds can be affected by wind, and will cast shadows. A number of presets enable you to choose different cloud formations as starting points; you can also save your own presets for reuse.”

If you’re looking to simulate an otherworldly setting—or simply to have more creative control over the ambience of your scene—you can now control the clarity and color of the dynamic sky via new settings for turbidity and atmosphere density. In addition, you can set the color or temperature of the sun (or the directional light in the case of HDRI skies). And finally, you can now set both color and the height of the exponential height fog, as well as its density.

The team behind the Twinmotion development believes that “with all these settings at your fingertips, you’ll undoubtedly start authoring some mood treatments you’d like to use on more than one occasion. That’s why we’ve also added the ability to save and reuse environment settings as presets, enabling you to apply all the settings in the Environment panel in a single click.” The tool even includes several default presets, such as “Golden hour,” “Sunrise glow,” “Rainy day,” and “Mars horizon.”

Recently Epic Games, Pixomondo, and Sony Electronics partnered for a one-of-a-kind training on virtual production for the Art Department Guild at Sony Pictures. The training gave more than 300 guild members a chance to get hands on with the latest virtual production tools, including Twinmotion software, the Sony VERONA LED wall and the VENICE 2.

Camera animation enhancements

The Twinmotion 2025.1 release features a series of enhancements including:

• Redesigned Environment panel to provide more logical groupings of settings, including making the distinction between dynamic sky and HDRI settings clearer.
• A brand-new Configurations feature enables you to build interactive 3D presentations that showcase different variations of a project to your clients or stakeholders.
• Lighting and rendering enhancements to extend Twinmotion’s capabilities and increase the quality of your real-time renders.
• In another boost to real-time rendering quality, Twinmotion implemented an optional new method for rendering shadows in real-time rendering mode based on Virtual Shadow Map (VSM) technology. This method is faster in most cases and produces shadows that are more accurate than Standard shadows and that are more consistent with path-traced shadows. This option is currently only available on Windows.

Camera animation enhancements also arrive with this version, a feature much requested by users. Now, regardless of whether you’re previsualizing a film shoot or showing off your architectural, automotive, or consumer product project to its best advantage, extra controls over your camera animation are always a boon, and this release offers several.

Epic Games says that “a new Orbit cam rig revolves the camera around its specified central pivot within the scene, making it easy to present a 360-degree view of an object or point of focus. You can set the start and end point and height offset. You can now also intuitively ease controls for speed adjustment and spatial manipulation to achieve smooth and controlled camera motion by selecting points on a camera path and adjusting their tangents. And you can precisely frame a shot on a specific moving target with the new ability to enable a look-at constraint for the Action cam.

Twinmotion was added to the Epic Games portfolio in 2019, when the company acquired the tool, used by architects and landscaping professionals to tweak their 3D models in real time and make them presentable for their clients, from developer Abvent. With the acquisition of Twinmotion Epic Games is expanding its suite of Unreal Engine tools. The latest version of Twinmotion, 2025.1 is a major update making 3D visualization easy and accessible to any creator in any industry. Twinmotion acts as an on-ramp to Unreal Engine, providing all the real-time power of Unreal Engine without the learning curve, so it’s simple for people in any industry to pick up and start using.