I’ve been learning to use D5 community version while I phase out Enscape, but now that Twinmotion is completely free I’m trying to figure out which to commit to. For my garden design work these are the biggest benefits of each:
Twinmotion is free.
Twinmotion supports spacemouse (I’ve been waiting for over a year for D5 to do this as I have limited movement in my hands).
Twinmotion vegetation can be set by age (not just scaled up/down).
Lumen/Raytracing option.
D5 has a vastly superior vegetation library.
D5 is faster.
D5 video presets.
Both have their advantages and disadvantages. Opting for traditional AutoCAD requires having and preparing many offline libraries in advance. Meanwhile, using D5 Pro requires payment, but you will have access to pre-existing libraries and, additionally, regular updates for online libraries.
I … just paid for my D5 pro subscription within the last month
I, also, just migrated from enscape. I find D5 superior in quality to both twinmotion and enscape but the difference is not great. Enscape still has superior live sync but its render quality is slightly worse. Twinmotion was about equal to enscape in quality but in a different lower quality way of pros and cons. Twinmotion does not have live sync although it does have a manual sync option. D5 has live sync but its still slightly buggy/not worked out. Ease of use goes to enscape (and has some nice options like standalone export an vr). The best quality goes to D5 imo of the 3. D5 is also far cheaper than enscape but wont be to twinmotion when it goes free in late april.
For the space mouse, i simply use it it from my native software and since it syncs to D5, its not an issue. I prefer to do more of my work in the native software and use my render software for… rendering.
I think the most efficient way for me to work is to get the SU model as good as can be and then move it to the standalone renderer to polish it up whilst SU is closed to keep the PC speed up. Moving high geometry plants (that aren’t available in D5 asset library) in Sketchup is a very slow process, so that’s why I want to be able to navigate around the render engine without SU being open, hence the Spacemouse issue.
I decided in favour of D5 and against Twinmotion a good 2 years ago because the results / quality of D5 were better, D5 was faster and easier for me to learn.
The much larger library was also a big plus point in favour of D5 at the time.
Although there were already some points in favour of Twinmotion back then:
It was already free for me back then.
Animation options were better.
Twinmotion was already available in German back then.
Painting with textures.
Modelling landscapes.
Vegetation can age and has seasons.
I would also like to see some of the points in D5.
The list is far from complete.
Would I still choose D5 over Twinmotion today?
I will now have another look at Twinmotion and then make a decision.
Let’s see if I come to the same conclusion as two years ago.
Thanks for all your advice and interest for D5. We are very glad to receive your idea. We plan to start a beta test for 2.7 in the near future and you are very welcome to join it if you have interest. We are also trying to add a 3D mouse to 2.7.
After a short test of the current version of Twinmotion, I have come to the same conclusion as 2 years ago.
For my requirements, D5 is the better choice!
Still!
D5 is much faster than Twinmotion.
At the moment I’m using a 3090 from Nvidea, I’ll skip the 4090 and see
see if D5 with the 5090 can keep the lead in speed.
I noticed again that the animation options in Twinmotion are much better than in D5.
Conclusion:
At the moment I’m sticking with D5 and hope for developments in the future.
I am curious.
I am an old Lumion user and it goes without saying that I have moved away from that (although the latest update Lumion 2024 does make good progress, but actually too late)
I run into the following things with d5.
weathered materials
fur materials
grass that works better with the ‘scatter tool’
reload models with geometry adjustment and then keep location - (do not change 0 point)
photo matching
apply path tool also for own imported models
Apply license plates to cars in just a few clicks
landscape modeling
When I look at TM.
I see that as an advantage
path tracing option
better animation
TM vegetation from old to new
larger foundation and company behind it. As long as d5 can switch quickly and add things, d5 will be able to keep up. The advantage of TM is that it is from Epic and therefore has many resources to innovate. However, I do wonder about innovating quickly.
reason why I haven’t tried TM after a few times. was that d5 made AI applicable. hopefully more will be done (think of the character with kea ai for example)
and that I know that TM crashes often. Now I understand that it only happens when you animate. Lumion used to crash very rarely. D5 has crashed a few times in my current project.
Here is an opinion from a Dutch person. the Dutch way, direct and in a blunt way.
Wow! Thank you for giving such detailed advice, we are very happy to have your advice. In fact, most of the requirements you mentioned are in the plan, and some of them will be added in 2.7, which will be available for beta testing soon. If you’re interested, you are welcome to join our beta afterwards.
