10 TIPS for Better, Faster Renderings in Twinmotion

cool what's up guys Justin here with the sketch essentials calm back with another sketch up in twin motion tutorial for you so in today's video I wanted to go through 10 tips for not only making your renderings more realistic but also for saving time when setting up your renderings inside of twin motion so this video is part of a series about twin motion in partnership with Epic Games so one of the cool things about twin motion is that it's free from epic games through early next year so if you download this version then you get to keep this version so this is a really great opportunity for you to get into real time rendering with a powerful rendering program so if that's something you're interested in the download link to download twin motion for free is in the notes below the video now let's go ahead and just jump into it alright so this is a model that I've downloaded from the 3d warehouse inside of Sketchup and model credit for this model is a suspended office sketch CMG 2008 and it's by funny or phony so if you want to go into the 3d warehouse and download this model you can definitely do that and one thing I've done is I've gotten in and I've turned off the vegetation and I fixed some faces and some materials and things like that I've also done a little bit of grouping in the outliner inside of Sketchup just so this is a little bit more organized but once I've done all of that I've taken this and I've exported it to twin motion using the twin motion direct link and so what I wanted to do is just go through some things it can really save you some time when working inside of twin motion alright and so the first tip has to do with placing grass on the ground inside of twin motion and so you can place grass actual 3d grass by going to your in nature settings and clicking on the button for vegetation but one thing about this is this can get a little bit tricky with trying to paint it on the ground using the vegetation tools so you can see how what this does is this tool you can see how this tool gives you kind of a circular brush that you can use to add grass inside of your rendering but the problem with this is you can see how it's really easy to accidentally place grass outside of the area that you're trying to place it in so you can see how right here I accidentally place grass on the paving which is obviously not what we want and so a great tip for placing this grass has to do with turning everything else off so what we're gonna do is we're actually going to come in here and we're gonna turn everything else off just by going into our Cena graph and using a shift-click in order to select everything that isn't your grass material so I'm just gonna do a shift-click and I'm just gonna turn all of this off then I'm also gonna come in here and I'm gonna turn off everything that isn't the actual grass itself I think the other way you could do this actually is you could right-click on this and click on the button for isolate and so what that'll do is that'll isolate this one object but now when you come in here and you paint your grass you can paint it without having to worry about putting it on another surface on the other side so when you isolate this you can see how what this does is this allows you to just come in here and paint grass onto these faces without you having to go back and do a whole bunch of extra work or anything like that and so the other piece of this and I'm going to exit the isolate just so you can kind of take a look at this and I guess I have to turn everything back on now so isolate is definitely easier and so this is great for placing this across big wide areas like this but the problem with something like this is your grass along your edges is still kind of sticking out right you can see how this grass right here along this edge is kind of sticking out into the paving so it looks okay but it's not fantastic well what you can do in order to get a little bit more control over that I'm just gonna right click I'm gonna isolate this again is along the edges you don't necessarily want to use the regular grass what you want to use instead is you want to use the grass for borders so you can see how there's a long grass borders in here well what that's gonna do is that's gonna fit along the border of this edge a lot better so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna remove grass really quick so I'm just gonna drop this down to like five feet or something like that and I'm just gonna remove this grass along the edge using the erase tool and then what we want to do instead is we want to drag in the long grass borders so we'll just drop this in here and now we'll use the paintbrush tool in order to paint this in and you can see how now where before your grass was kind of sticking out into the middle of the road right there well now if you take a look at this and you zoom in you can see how this border grass does a much better job of fitting inside of the border so you can use the isolate and also the border grass in order to place better grass inside of your renderings so you can definitely use this tool to paint in other things like trees and other things like that in here but sometimes you want to be a little bit more precise in the way that you're gonna add these things and so one thing you can do is you can use the multi drop function inside of twin motion to add things like vegetation and it's gonna bring them in kind of randomized so when you have trees and other things like that that you're trying to place inside of your model you never really want them to be exactly the same size or have the same orientation right because trees don't really work that way they're kind of random well one way you can add trees into your renderings just to drag them in like this so just drag them in one after the other but you can also select one of these trees and then once it's selected you can just move your mouse in here and you can just click well one of the cool things about this is when you do this if you look at these trees you can see how they're getting brought in at a random size and a random rotation meaning when you drop these in here using the multi drop function or the click function this is randomizing them so that they're actually a little bit more natural looking so if I click on them you can see how they're all at a different size so the size slider has been randomized for each one of these so this allows you to quickly add random vegetation in here that looks natural and realistic without you having to come in and mess with the settings every single time so sometimes when you're working in a rendering like this especially if you have an older or slower PC there's things in here like the trees that really kind of eat up some processing power and what you can do is you can use the Cena graph in order to turn those off until you need them so for example I've added all of these different trees in here well for the meantime if I don't want these to be shown I can just do a shift click and select them all and turn them all off so you can use this to control the visibility of those trees especially if you don't want those rendering while you're in here doing work so you can also come in here and right click and click new container and you can create a container for your trees and your vegetation and we'll drag this out of here but then you could take all of these trees and do a shift click and then drag them into your trees and vegetation group then you can use this to turn those on and off without having to do the shift click and select them all so you can use this to toggle the visibility of things like cars or people or other things like that inside of your rendering really easily and so you can also and we talked about this with the grass you can select an object right click and click on the button for isolate in order to isolate that to things inside of your group and for some reason my trees and vegetation got brought into that group so we don't necessarily want that but like if I wanted to isolate the ground I could just right-click on my ground and click on isolate or exit isolate you can see how that isolated this to just the things inside of this group so you can also use this for adding grass or really focusing in on different areas if you need to do that and then when you want everything back just click on exit isolate and that'll bring everything back inside of your rendering so a lot of the time you'll decide you want like a different kind of tree or something like that in your rendering or in your image well going through and replacing all of these trees could be a bit of a pain I mean you could do like a control click and select all of these and delete them and place new trees in here a much faster way if you wanted these to all be one kind of tree is you can select this and you can actually find those trees inside of your Cena graph just by doing a shift click and then if you right-click there's a tool in here called replace object and so replace object is gonna allow you to replace this object with a different object that you drag in down below so if we take this and for example we don't want these to be the black gum trees anymore we want them to be like the Bradford pears you can drag this in here to the box that says drop here and you can click on start replace so you do have to be a little bit careful because obviously these trees are a lot bigger than the trees that we had in here before so maybe it will try something else maybe like a smaller tree maybe we want to replace these with orange trees so you'll drop this in here and you'll click on the button for start replace and this will replace these with orange trees rather than the trees we had in here before so another thing about this is you can also right click on it click replace object and let's say you wanted different kinds of orange trees in here so we could drag all three of these and then click on the start replace and you can see how what this did is this randomly replace these with one of the selected tree objects you can see how now we have orange tree one two and three all in here so you can use this to kind of randomize your objects that are in here as well so I'm gonna go ahead and put these back to the black gum trees so I'm just going to drag probably the number two in here click start replace and we're back to normal but that's a really quick way to swap out objects and inside of your rendering so you could also do this if you added all of your lights in Sketchup you could use this to replace these with an assembly that has an actual light inside of it as well so let's say for example that we were working on this road and we needed to place a bunch of different light fixtures that are kind of running along the road so or we needed add light fixtures that are running along a road well if we were to go in here and select under furnitures city street lights so what you could do is you could come in here and you could place a bunch of these different street lights manually right so you can take this and you could place this streetlight you could kind of rotate it so that it's facing the right way I think that's actually pretty close to what we need and then if you wanted to you could just do that over and over and over again so you could definitely do that but it becomes a little bit painful especially if you're trying to keep everything evenly placed well what you can do instead so if I undo this is when you select this object and you've got the move tool active or if you hold down the shift key while you're dragging this and this is gonna bring up a little menu that's gonna say copy and so what copy does is that allows you to create a number of different copies in a straight line and so there's two options in here there's the option for an instance and an option for a copy so an instance is going to be something that's linked back to your original so if you make a change the first one then any changes will be reflected to the second one as well if it's a copy they won't really be linked together we'll talk about this more in a second but in this situation let's say that I wanted maybe four streetlights at a spacing of 15 feet I could just set the number four and I could set the spacing to 15 feet and hit OK you can see how what that does is that's going to create an array of copies based on the spacing that I had in here and so you can do this as many times as you want to and it's a lot faster for creating objects that need be in a line then coming in here and doing this manual so another important tip when working in twin motion is understanding the difference between replace material mode and apply to object mode and so replace material mode right now if we were to come in here and we wanted to replace the face of this metal panel and we wanted to replace it with let's go with some kind of a gray aloo Caban panel so you can see how when I click and drag this in here right here well it's also replacing anywhere else in this model where this aloo Caban panel or where this material that we're replacing was in here right so like for example if I drag this onto this material maybe I'll do something like the carbon instead it's almost a little smoother but if I was to drag this in here well you can see how what this does is this also replaces the material on the canopy well as long as we have the option for replace material set it's always going to do that it's going to replace the material everywhere inside of your rendering however if I undo this and I click this and I sell so if I click and hold on these two circles right here there's an option for apply to object well if I select apply to object and then click and drag this in here you can see how this is only applying that material to the singular object that I've moused over inside of my rendering so where with with the option for replace material set you're gonna replace the material everywhere for the option for apply to object and you can use this to apply a material to an individual item inside of your rendering so you can see how I can apply this just to this outside face of this object without applying everywhere else and replacing this material everywhere else now one thing to note about this is I believe I'm not a hundred percent sure on this one I believe this only works if when you import your model you import your model outline so when you do a file import under options if you select the option for collapse material I'm not a hundred percent sure but I don't think this will work I think you need to select the option for keep hierarchy so that you keep your model higher Archy over here I'm not a hundred percent sure on that but I believe that's the way it's worked for me in the past but if you do bring this in with your model hierarchy then it can be significantly easier to replace just a single objects materials inside of twin motion and so one of the things that kind of makes renderings look a little bit weird sometimes is you never have a big uninterrupted space like this one right so I mean even though this looks wide open one of the reasons that renderings a lot of the time look odd is because if you were to pull up like an image of a street in Google Street View this would be broken up with things like striping and manhole covers and other things like that well one of the cool things about twin motion is it actually has a library of decals in here that you can use in order to make this this look more realistic so if you just go into furnitures and click on decals you can see how there's things like this crossing for example you can use this to add a street crossing across the street just by adding it as a decal and so if we kind of zoom in you can see how what this does is this goes on to the face of the asphalt that we have on here so it's in here as an individual object and then if you get your alignment right and then say you were to click and drag it like this you could make a couple different copies of this and you can use this to quickly add things like your crossing in the street and so there's also other things in here like line dashes or Road dashes other things like that so for example we could add this in here and then you can adjust your size and you want to be careful with your size a little bit you don't wanna make it too big because then your scale gets weird you could also just make a number of different copies in here like this but you can use this to add those lines to your road so you can use this to add Road striping but then there's also things in here like like manhole covers so let's say for example that you felt like there was a sewer line or something running in this street you can add man covers running down the middle here you could also add like sewer grates and other things like that in order to add to that realism so you can see how just by breaking some of this up it already looks more realistic than it would otherwise and obviously you need to give some thought to this so you wouldn't have like a white line running across this face because vehicles would need to turn in and out but you can use this in order to quickly break up those surfaces so for example you could use the graffiti and you could drag this onto the surface in order to break this up so if you didn't want this to be a big uninterrupted surface you could use these in order to uh in order to add some interest to your faces inside of your renderings so my next tip is to use reflection planes in order to create realistic glass that actually reflects inside of your renderings so right now for example if I was to render out this building the glass might reflect a little bit of light but it's not really reflecting and it's not really simulating the Rays bouncing off of the light very well however there's a tool in here under volumes so if you and a library volumes there's an option here for reflection probes and so what a reflection what a reflection probe is gonna do and we'll take a closer look at this what a reflection probe is gonna do is that's actually gonna simulate light inside of your rendering bouncing off of your glass material so for example if I make this a little bit bigger you can see how when I expand this reflection probe you could you start seeing reflections inside of this inside of this glass that you weren't seeing before so now if I kind of move my my view over here you can see how I can actually see the reflection of the other half of the building in this glass where before you don't so you can see how when I flip this on and off when it's on you're getting more reflections being simulated inside of your rendering than you were before so the upside of this is this will simulate the light bouncing off of your glass and increase realism the downside of this is whenever you add a reflection probe it's also negatively gonna affect your performance because that's just a lot more stuff that rendering engine needs to calculate right so it's just gonna take longer in order to for all of your renderings to come out just because this is more processing power in order to process the light bouncing but it also does a better job of simulating the light bouncing in here and it's gonna give you a better quality product so my recommendation in this situation is to use reflection probes only in areas where you might actually see some reflections so areas like the glass on the front side of this building when I render it with the clouds and everything I'm gonna want this to simulate reflections but there's really no reason if I go on the back side of the building like unless I'm starting to render this there's really no reason to put a reflection probe back here because I'm not rendering an image from that side of the building so there's no point to it trying to do all the calculations back there but reflection probes are gonna be really important if you do want those accurate reflections inside of your renderings so the next tip has more to do with your settings when you're actually exporting your rendering so one thing that people struggle with when they're creating renderings is getting realism and so one of the reasons for that is a lot of the time what happens if you create a rendering and we'll go ahead and create a new image inside of our image but if you look at this right now if we were to render out this image it just kind of looks wrong so part of the reason is I haven't gone in and actually filled out the rest of my context and my background looks a little bit weird but part of it is just when you get big areas like this paved area and there's nothing breaking it up then your brain just kind of looks at it and thinks oh there's something wrong about that negatively affects your realism so what happens in a lot of rendering programs and this is true in twin motion as well is instead of rendering something like this out and I'll go ahead and render this out and show it to you as an example if you open up this rendering I mean it looks fine like it doesn't look bad it looks a little bit computer gamey but part of the reason for that is because you've got this asphalt paving material in here and you've got this huge area that's not broken up by anything visually and so there's a few different things you can do in order to change that so one thing you could do is add some cars and some context with people walking down the road but the other thing you can do is inside of your rendered images if you go into your settings you can go into your weather and you want to drag this drag this bar to the right until you get kind of this wet pavement effect and so you have to be a little bit careful in here like I don't necessarily want there to be I don't necessarily want there to be like rain particles in here but what I want is I want this to kind of break up all of these different areas so you can see how now what I'm doing is I've got dry areas I've got wet areas and I've also got light kind of reflecting off of this pavement so what that does and you know a little bit goes a long way in a situation like this but what this does is this really breaks this up so that your ground and your pavement looks more realistic so you'll see this effect and you can go kind of the right over here as well you don't need this to be everywhere you don't need everything to look super soaked but you can definitely use this in order to add a little bit of visual interest to this and also just break up some of those big areas so that your brain doesn't look at this and say well those paving areas just look wrong so that's from an in this video leave a comment below let me know what you thought were these tips helpful to you what's your favorite tip for working into one motion I just love having that conversation with you guys if you like this video please remember to click that like button down below if you're new around here remember to click that subscribe button for new Sketchup content every week as always thank you so much for taking the time to watch this I really appreciate it and I will catch you in the next video thanks guys

Channel: TheSketchUpEssentials

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Keywords: thesketchupessentials, the sketchup essentials, thesketchupessentials.com, sketchup tutorials, sketchup lessons, sketchup modeling, sketchup 2018, architecture, sketchup tutorial, justin geis, sketchup, rendering tutorials, the rendering essentials, twinmotion 2019, twinmotion tutorial, twinmotion for beginners, twinmotion lighting, twinmotion rendering, twinmotion 2019 tutorial, twinmotion epic games, twinmotion tips, twinmotion best tips, twinmotion realistic render

Id: hzzljWR2sbM

Length: 22min 14sec (1334 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 21 2019