Twinmotion direct link

ScottS
ScottS
in BricsCAD BIM

I got a chance to play with the new Twinmotion direct link. Very nice. A few snags slowed me down at first, so I thought I'd share my experience so far and hope to hear others'.

I imported updated geometry to a model I'd begun rendering previously (pre-v22), aiming to avoid reassigning materials that hadn't changed or having to recreate camera views, background, daylight settings, etc. Maybe there's a way to copy that stuff between tm files?

Anyway, the first thing I noticed was that the new geometry came in to Twinmotion (2022.1 Preview) rotated 180° about the world origin, even though the WCS back in BricsCAD never changed. Not hard to select all new objects and rotate into proper position, but odd that that happened.

More puzzling was that several wall entities failed to import. Some walls came in, along with slabs, ceilings, even windows floating where they ought to be in the missing walls. I tried changing materials, BIM compositions, wblocking and re-inserting, running audit and dmAudit,... nothing worked. Finally, I realized all the truant walls were the only entities on the "A-WALL" layer in bcad, so I moved them to a new layer and—voila! Something about that layer they'd been on didn't want to cooperate. The walls that had come in without trouble had been on a different layer.

After resolving that, the direct synchronizing worked seamlessly. I'm still getting accustomed to Twinmotion (used to blender and, prior to that, 3dsmax), but quite pleased with what it can do, impressively fast, so far.

Comments

  • RubenDBricsys
    RubenDBricsys

    Hi Scott,

    Thanks for sharing your experience. I'm happy to hear you like our Direct Link with Twinmotion!

    We are looking into the issue with rotated models.

    I was not able to reproduce the issue with the missing entities on certain layers. Could you share the .dwg model (here or in a Support Request) to be investigated?
    Or share the layer settings of this particular layer? Layers that are 'Off' or 'Frozen' obviously don't get exported with the Direct Link, but others should.
    Does it only occur when using the Twinmotion 2022 beta version, or also with TM2021?

    Thanks!

    Ruben

  • ScottS
    ScottS

    Yes, Ruben. I'm attaching a .dwg and a synced .tm file made in TM2021.1.4 (which actually is what I was using first, then I installed TM2022.1 preview/beta version, but the missing entity issue remained).

    Interestingly, it imports the windows fine, which are component blocks on the problematic A-WALL layer. I didn't notice before due to old overlapping geometry, but it looks like the slab on the A-FLOOR-concrete layer also fails to import.

    I'll submit an SR, too, so you can track this. Thank you.

  • ScottS
    ScottS

    Oops. The forum gremlins got me.