What’s new in Twinmotion 2025.1
Easy realistic exterior environments
Whatever kind of storyteller you are, if your scene includes any element of an outdoor setting, you’ll welcome a slew of enhancements to Twinmotion’s environment features.
First up, we’ve added 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.
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. We’ve provided several default presets, including “Golden hour,” “Sunrise glow,” “Rainy day,” and “Mars horizon.”
In concert with this effort, we’ve redesigned the Environment panel to provide more logical groupings of settings, including making the distinction between dynamic sky and HDRI settings clearer. And you can now separately affect the season, precipitation, and leaf fall/color, enabling you to have fall colors with a snow shower, for example.
Configurations
More interested in what’s inside the virtual studio, design review, or showhome? A brand-new Configurations feature enables you to build interactive 3D presentations that showcase different variations of a project to your clients or stakeholders—great for new-build real estate sales teams, product designers, automotive manufacturers, and many more use cases.
With a simple click on a trigger icon, you can instantly switch between the variations when using Twinmotion in Fullscreen mode or when viewing images, panoramas, videos, or sequences in local presentations.
Lighting and rendering enhancements
With applications across industries, this release brings a number of lighting and rendering enhancements to extend Twinmotion’s capabilities and increase the quality of your real-time renders.
Case in point: You can now project any image or video texture onto a surface with the new Projector lights—perfect for visualizing live events or installations, or for simulating effects like caustic reflections on the hull of a boat, for example.
Architects will be pleased to hear we’ve significantly enhanced real-time rendering of orthographic views in Standard and Lumen lighting modes; there’s now support for shadows, and the black outline around objects has been removed. This enables you to quickly produce high-quality plan and elevation views without using the Path Tracer, as well as facilitating more precise interactive object placement.
In another boost to real-time rendering quality, we’ve implemented an optional new method for rendering shadows in real-time rendering mode based on Virtual Shadow Map (VSM) technology. This method produces shadows that are more accurate than Standard shadows and that are more consistent with path-traced shadows. It is also faster in most cases; however, it is currently slower when using precipitation. This option is currently only available on Windows.
Camera animation enhancements
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.
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.
Features for automotive and transportation design
This release offers a number of features with specific applicability to automotive and transportation designers.
Case in point: There’s new support for importing surfaces in the Alias Wire file format, which is widely used in the industry. In the Import dialog box, you can set tessellation parameters for extra precision; Coarse, Low, Medium, and High presets are provided. Autodesk Alias needs to be installed for this feature to be enabled.
There’s also a new Tire base material that textures and automatically creates UVs for flat cylindrical objects, such as tires. Four tire materials have also been added to the Library in the Materials category.
In addition, we’ve added new controls for pearlescent scale, clear coat roughness, and imperfections (dust, fingerprints, and scratches) to the Car paint material, together with new Coated carbon fiber materials in the Metals category—all of which add to the realism of vehicle visualizations, and potentially other use cases.
And there’s more!
Rounding out these categories, there’s still more to discover in Twinmotion 2025.1 with a range of features designed to increase your productivity and make your work more enjoyable. There’s a new Measure tool that enables you to precisely measure the distance between any two arbitrary points. There are tools for mirroring objects across a plane, reversing face normals, and selecting and deleting faces. And there’s automatic level of detail (LOD) generation to enable you to maintain real-time performance when working with complex imported meshes.
The list doesn’t end there. You can now multi-select media and adjust any of their Ambience settings simultaneously, while keeping other settings different. For example, you could adjust the time of day or weather, turn Lumen on or off, or apply color grading effects across a range of media at once. You can also multi-select items in the Import dock for deletion.
And finally, what’s a release without a celebration? Bring on the new confetti particles! As well as a range of provided presets in the Twinmotion Library, you can save and reuse your own. It’s a glimpse of things to come.
In case you missed these…
Since our last major release, we’ve also sneaked in some extra goodies to our dot releases. If you missed them, be sure to check out the UV randomizer for breaking up repetitive texture tiling; more realistic wind animation on vegetation, and the ability to simulate wind on draped fabrics like curtains that debuted in Twinmotion 2024.1.1.
We also added a new collection of 62 photorealistic growable tree species from different parts of the world—including North America, Japan, Oceania, tropical regions, and Europe—to the Twinmotion Library. Each tree comes in three stages of maturity, giving a total of 186 new trees.
Not to be outdone, Twinmotion 2024.2 added triplanar mapping to help you fix those pesky messed-up or missing UVs; a new clear coat effect on the Standard base material; and texture and mesh management sections to the Statistics panel, where you can find and filter information about size, resolution, and triangle count to identify resource-hungry elements in order to optimize scene performance.
So that’s a round up of the highlights of what’s new since Twinmotion 2024.1. Take a look at the release notes to get more details on all the updates and enhancements in Twinmotion 2025.1.