This article provides a thorough examination of the two render engines within Twinmotion, Realtime and Path Tracer. It analyses their uses, the results each produces, the components of each, and the effect they can have on the overall quality and performance of a project.
Key Insights
- Realtime and Path Tracer are the two render engines within Twinmotion; Realtime doesn't require buffering and load path tracing, while Path Tracer simulates real-world light behavior, resulting in more accurate and realistic shadows, reflectivity, and light bouncing.
- Choosing a rendering method significantly influences performance, turnaround time, and image quality. The Path Tracer engine, while providing higher realism, can be more demanding on hardware and can take longer render times, making it perhaps less feasible for larger animations.
- Realtime rendering offers the advantage of speed and immediacy, allowing for fluid interaction with a model and instant feedback. While it may not provide the same level of polish as full rendering, it is ideal for design in progress and fast previews.
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All right, welcome back. So in this video, we are going to take a deep dive into the two render engines within Twinmotion, the Realtime and Path Tracer, and help you understand when to use each one and what kind of results to expect. Rendering is like the final step that turns all your scene setup, materials, lighting, camera views, and environment into polished images and animations.
But choosing the right rendering method makes a big difference in this quality performance and turnaround time. So to go into here, you got render, this is where you have render and path tracer. So realtime is essentially not having to buffer and load path tracer, if I click this, it may take a couple minutes for it to kind of load this whole thing, or do that, but it has its own different set of quality and atmospheric things.
You can see that the light and the shadows just perform better overall. However, certain computers cannot process path tracers. For example, path tracer is not available on a Mac.
Path tracer was introduced a few versions ago, and it creates a much higher level of realism. The engine simulates real-world light behavior by tracing rays of light as they bounce through your scene, just like how light behaves in reality. When path tracer is turned on, you'll notice that shadows become softer and more accurate, materials with reflectivity will behave more realistically, glass, metal, polished wood, and ambient light will bounce naturally across surfaces.
This is especially noticeable indoors. The path tracer captures indirect light bouncing off walls and floors, illuminating your space more naturally. So once you enable path tracer, there are a few options become available.
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You can go into your details, and you have samples per pixel, max bounces, emissive, denoiser, and fireflies. Your max bounces, this determines how many times a light ray can reflect or refract through the scene. More bounces equals more realistic lighting, but longer render times.
Render quality can be set to low, medium, or high, depending on what your needs are. And obviously, the higher the settings are, the more time it will take. Fireflies control the visibility and exposure of the firefly artifacts.
And then, you know, if I go into my camera settings, all of this will be treated a little bit differently. So I'm going to duplicate the scene, just so that way I can compare the two. And I'm going to rename this one exterior one path tracer PT.
And you know this one right here, I'm going to turn off the path tracer. There's also a little button right here on the top to enable and disable the path tracer. So I'm going to sync this one.
Now I have one with no path tracer and one with path tracer on. I'll rename this one to, um, call RT for real time. So I have RT and PT.
And so each of these is going to have, is going to need a little bit different quality of lighting. You can, you can see here that even, even alone, like this scene is ultimately brighter than this one. So I may even want to bring down my exposure a little bit to kind of compensate for that increased light bounces that happen.
So with path tracer, it's definitely more demanding on your hardware and rendering 4,000 image with a high bounce count can ultimately take around five to six hours per image. If you're doing an animation and let's say you need 30 images for one second of animation, that can take an incredibly long time to render and on and possibly not even feasible. So typically with the real time settings, you can get renders done at such a faster speed and rate, but that still have a really nice kind of quality to them.
So things to consider is like, where, where do you want? Are you trying to get super realistic or are you just trying to create some really nice scenes in a very quick and effective process? So I use path tracer for some final renderings. Interiors look a little bit better in path tracer. However, the new version of Lumen of the real time actually looks really well, looks really good.
Close up details, path tracer always looks good. And you know, it just kind of really depends on your end goal. So jumping over to the real time engine, there are two different versions.
There is standard and Lumen and each of these are going to have its own different quality. Standard looks okay, but Lumen actually has some really great settings. However, you'll need to adjust the lighting and stuff differently for each of these.
So I can bump up my exposure and I can bump up my things like that to get this kind of right. But there's a lot of really nice features that Lumen has. Lumen actually looks really good on interiors and it's something that I recommend using for interiors.
And we're actually later in this course, we will be rendering an interior interior space and where we would actually be using Lumen for the entire time. So with real time rendering, this, this, this render engine uses the screen based lighting and reflection techniques, allowing you to interact with your model fluidly and get instant feedback. So this is really ideal for your design in progress and you need to see changes instantly.
You're producing walkthroughs or animations. You want fast previews, things like that. The downside is it's not physically accurate.
Reflection shadows and lighting are approximated, not ray traced. So while it looks good, it won't have the polish of a full render. So keep that in mind with what your kind of needs are.
Most people won't be able to see that. You can see like the shadows and stuff don't look as good as the ray traced thing. So you may need to maybe adjust that a bit and show what the shadows will do.
But under Lumen settings, there's actually a lot more settings related to shadows and reflectivity, which we will jump and focus more of that in our, our next video. But before we do that, let's talk a few more things kind of about the performance considerations and some of the, the quality that you'll get. So I recommend using these real time render, renders for, for even your still renderings because of the export time.
When it comes to actually being productive and creating things for a client, it comes down to being efficient and having, being quick to create something and also have something that has a really high quality to it. And that's where I think real time actually does a really great job with. Four years ago, when you were looking at Twinmotion doing real time, it was night and day difference between what it is now.
So today we're in a really exciting time where you can create real time feedback renders that look incredible. The shadows for the real time render engine is, they come in fast, but they're a little bit harsh. Path Tracer shadows are a little bit soft and more accurate.
Lighting is simpler and maybe not as easily to adjust in Path Tracer versus, or in real time versus Path Tracer. And then glass, glass actually, exterior glass actually looks a lot better in Path Tracer versus Lumen. So I like, I personally like using sometimes Path Tracer on my exterior images.
I just feel like it renders glass so much better and lighting and all that. But on the interior, let's go show this real fast on this interior scene right here of doing Path Tracer, which looks like this, and then doing Lumen. So Lumen automatically kind of doesn't look, look, look very great until I start, you know, adjusting different kind of lighting and adjustments in there.
But overall, I'm looking at like reflectivity and things like that. And I see that I'll have to play around with it a bit more, but right now, like it's pretty raw. So doing a, doing a comparison like this may not be the best, but overall, we'll, we'll look at that in one of the next couple, couple lessons where we'll, we'll focus on a bit more of what that looks like.
So yeah, so let's, let's jump into the next section of render settings and we'll, I will end this video and we can jump back in on the next, the next video.
