KPF builds and shares design experiences with Twinmotion
Architectural firm KPF, known worldwide for large-scale architectural and urban projects, leverages Twinmotion’s new features, Presenter Cloud and Bridge to Unreal Engine, to quickly share and iterate with both designers and clients.
Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates (KPF) is an international design firm known for large-scale architectural projects. Their work includes the world's tallest towers and largest airports, as well as innovative master plans and smart cities.
KPF’s designs come in a variety of beautiful and inventive forms, with the dual goals of inspiring the community and mitigating their lifecycle impact on environmental resources. Designing a large structure is an iterative process, and KPF finds that Twinmotion helps them share information with stakeholders easily for a truly collaborative design process.
With nine offices spanning the globe, KPF has designed structures everywhere from the United States to Europe and China. A single project might involve personnel from several offices and time zones, with team members getting together in virtual reality to explore the space.
While KPF has long used Unreal Engine for real-time design and collaboration, they now use Twinmotion as well. With clients in so many different geographic locations, and with projects involving such a magnitude of data, KPF has naturally gravitated towards the use of Twinmotion Cloud in Twinmotion. With this feature, any Windows or macOS user can access a Twinmotion project remotely, without downloading or installing Twinmotion or any other software, and without the need for high-end hardware. Twinmotion Cloud, which operates through a web browser, makes it possible for KPF’s clients to review, explore, and give feedback on designs from anywhere.
Image courtesy of KPF
KPF’s software of choice for design is Rhino, which can be directly linked and synchronized with Twinmotion; as designers work on the design in Rhino, the visualization updates in Twinmotion in real time. “It's really important with the way we work at KPF because we want this visual feedback to be immediate,” says Ayman Tawfeeq, Architectural Designer at KPF. “Having all this in one place helps designers to work efficiently.”
The team at KPF also appreciates Twinmotion’s ease of use, especially its methodology for applying vegetation to a scene. Grass and trees, with animation visible in real time, provide strong visuals for the types of narrative stories and experiences that KPF wants to create.
Image courtesy of KPF
“We are constantly presenting on a weekly basis to clients, and on a daily basis to teams across the world,” says Tawfeeq. “Revisions in the design constantly happen. It’s important to have software and programs that have the flexibility and capacity to adapt to such a very challenging workflow.”
The new Bridge to Unreal Engine feature means that after iterating with clients through Twinmotion Cloud, designers can bring their Twinmotion work into Unreal Engine for more advanced finishing.
Perhaps Twinmotion’s best facet is that it saves designers time, time they can spend being creative instead of worrying about the technical details of presentation. “You’re always trying to make a better and a more interesting experience,” says Tawfeeq. “The sky's the limit to what we can achieve with Twinmotion in the future.”