From Revit to Twinmotion - What You *NEED* to Know.

[Music] thank you [Music] all right all right all right hello hello oh man hello and welcome to episode 81 of Bim after dark live my name is Jeff also known as the Revit kid thank you guys for joining me tonight it's been a little while so uh bear with me as I work out the kings of pressing all the buttons and running a live show uh for those of you who have joined me in the past uh I think the last live stream was probably gosh is that Crone was on and it might have been back in May or June I'm not really sure so uh so thanks for joining me tonight uh tonight we're going to be talking about twin motion for those of you who have not seen the news Autodesk and epic uh announced a strategic partnership which uh we don't know much about but the initial understanding about the Strategic partnership is is getting more Revit users using twin motion by giving basically full access to Twin motion to all Revit subscribers or license holders however you want to say it so I thought it'd be kind of interesting to unpack that a little bit if if you guys are interested in any commentary on it I'm more than welcome to have it but also uh to introduce you guys to Twin motion as Revit users so I've been using twin motion for oh Christ it must be almost four years now uh I started using it just before epic um purchased a twin motion and uh and have been using it ever since um as you guys know I'm I'm always I'm always all about learning the the visualization tools um from enscape to Twin motion to lumion and um I've been using twin motion quite a bit so um I thought uh it would be a good opportunity to uh show you guys whether you're Advanced or brand new uh to the edge to the software of twin motion as Revit users a little bit of the workflow but also just kind of what you need to know what you know some of the some of the the need to know items and Lessons Learned From A Revit user to a uh future potential Revit twin motion user to let you guys give you a little bit of a head start um whenever it is that you get access for free to Twin motion if you already don't have access so um so yeah so before we jump into the content for today I did want to mention that this season of Bim after dark live which will be about 10 episodes until Christmas time is actually brought to you by the Bim after dark community so for those of you not familiar with the Bim after dark Community is it is a private Community hosted by myself and it is a location where I not only hosted my full-length courses but also have a entire Community aspect to it so if you see over here on my screen the community is basically a private place where you can ask Revit questions and myself and other members will answer you can access all kinds of great things you can see here's a bunch of conversations here between members so think of it as your your typical Revit support group but without all the noise of social media and forms but also with full-length courses so I have all four of my courses on here them can be sexy which is presentation content Bim can make paper which is documentation Bim can make families which I'm assuming you guys know what that would be which is making families and then DIY Dynamo and the nice thing about this is they are self-paced full line courses with sample files and the ability to ask questions comment chat in each lesson so part of the reason I did this is to make my courses more interactive but something else that we do is we have office hours and so every other week I hold a live office hour with myself and whatever members want to join as well as potentially guests and so you'll see a week ago we actually had Paul Aubin on and he joined us for a nice Zoom call so if you ever wanted a zoom call directly with myself or another Revit Master then definitely check it out so one thing I am doing in honor of this little support of of this page here is that I am offering 30 off anyone who joins the community from now into the end of the season so now into the end of the year so head on over to community.bimafterdark.com check out all the cool stuff that's there and if you're interested make sure you take advantage of this uh deal uh towards the end of the year I'll obviously keep mention it every week but uh definitely check it out if you're interested in up in your Revit game or simply connecting with other ever users or taking it to the next level or interacting with me so that's community.bim afterdark.com uh looks like we've got some uh returning uh um audience members so Juniors back John Gray nice to see you guys again I know it's been a little while so uh great that you guys can join us um there's a little bit of a chat about twin motion as well um so what I wanted to do before I jumped into the content of of sort of walking through the the outline app here of some of the need to know items I did want to get a sense of maybe where where everyone is as far as your experience in um twin motion so simply in the chat all I want you to say is Noob or expert okay so like just like the shirt so Noob or expert it's all you have to say I know there might be an in-between but for now just put yourself on one Spectrum either you're an expert or your Noob just so I get a sense of maybe how how far into uh twin motion maybe you have gone or maybe if you've never even heard of it or seen it or used it then uh then definitely say noob and that's perfectly fine because I can go either way with how this content goes looks like we're going to have a mixed bag which is awesome Clayton O'Connor thanks for joining man first time cheers cheers this show is uh live every Thursday night so for the next 10-ish weeks give or take some holidays uh we will be here every Thursday night at 9pm Eastern we got a lot of noobs awesome actually that's super exciting okay and experts don't don't run away because I can promise you that uh uh there's still a lot of cool little tricks and tips and tricks that I will probably mention that maybe you haven't thought of or maybe you just didn't think of doing it this way as well as light Setting Sun settings all that cool stuff so looks like we got a lot of noobs a couple experts so really awesome okay so the way I'm going to kind of frame this this discussion is as I mentioned sort of trying to think about just what you guys need to know so you may have twin motion now you may get an email from your Autodesk reseller or somebody at some point in time that says hey you have access to Twin motion maybe it's already happened I don't know but what I wanted to do is give you sort of a rundown so that when that happens you have somewhere to look or or at least somewhere to to reference as a guide to get you to jump right into it a bunch of a bunch of noob Noob Noob Noob new so many noobs awesome DH design asked if I finished my Edition I did I'm actually in the the office this is the studio office of mine is is the lower level of the Edition uh one day I will post some sort of a a walk through I know I know I've gotten that question a few times people are interested because I've mentioned it so much throughout the the live streams um over the years um it is complete we've been living in it enjoying all that extra space including my dedicated office studio so maybe one day I'll do like a studio tour or something and post it on YouTube I just I just haven't gotten it yet okay so lots of noobs which is great A couple experts which is perfectly fine so the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to jump in I'm just going to talk about um getting your model into twin motion so so getting your model into twin motion uh you know that's that's the first piece right is is what how does this connection work what should I do how can I go about it and so there's really just two ways um there is importing a static exported version of your file so taking your model exporting it and then importing that exported version into twin motion it actually used it used to use fbx's now it uses a data Smith connection which is which is something that I will say I was a little confused uh initially when when I saw the Strategic partnership with with um with Autodesk being announced because twin motion is done quite a bit in the advancement of of connecting Revit to Twin motion without this partnership so I'm kind of curious to see what this unfolds uh moving forward but they have spent quite a bit of time over the last I'd say about two years um really refining some of the issues that we were running to and some of the the downfalls of connecting the a direct Revit model to Twin motion so with all that being said it used to be an fbx now it's actually a DOT data Smith file which is anyone who's used unreal before might be familiar with that and and there I was a little confused about it first because it's just not something you're used to because there's sort of a data back into it but uh the truth of the matter is um it's it's still when you do the export it can still be thought of as just an exported model that you import and so I will first admit that when I'm using twin motion a majority of the time I'm using a direct an export to a data Smith file the reason for that is when I'm using twin motion a lot of times I'm doing a lot of design options or a lot of phasing like site Logistics and all kinds of constructiony stuff um and because of that having a direct connection like like the the synchronize which is uh called direct link or auto sync they have all different names for it now I have the ability to export multiple versions of it bring it into twin motion and then turn on those versions as I needed as opposed to the direct link which is relying on that defaulted view that you linked it to so all that being said um the direct or the the the export to data Smith file this is the data Smith plugin which you can download for free from the Epic or unreal site and I'll put a link to it in the description afterwards and all you do is you click export to data Smith and it exports a file and so that that's the the first and and fastest way to sort of get into it and so I'm not even going to rename this I'm just going to call it and I probably should rename it because there's all a bunch of crap in here so I'm just going to call this Barn uh full or I'll just say I'll just call it Barn file for now so from that it's just exporting a file so kind of think of that as a 3D just a 3D export like an fbx or or any other version there and once it's exported what I'll show you on my desktop here is that oops I didn't put in my desktop sorry where did I put it I put it in pictures that's bizarre I don't know why it defaulted the pictures on me there um now you get to see pictures of my kids so here we go so Barn filed that day is missed so with with these files um there's a data Smith file and then there's an assets file and so if I double click on the assets you can see these are all meshes and textures so part of the reason they they went with this is it has that ability to have the data back end and so what's nice about it is when you bring it into twin motion so this is this is the first way that you could bring in files is by exporting from Revit and then importing to Twin motion and so if I go into twin motion I can just click import I can go into geometry click open pictures I don't know why I put in pictures click the data Smith file and click open and then from there I'll talk about what these settings are in a second but for now I'm just going to leave it the same and just click import so from there what you can see is if I zoom out and find my find my model here by the way a pro tip for maybe some of the experts out there is when you select any object in the tree over here if you let's say select the I don't know the railing here and I press F on my keyboard it zooms to that item that's selected so you can see here here's here's my file brought in so full disclosure I don't have any textures set up in Revit for this project because I always plan on redoing them in Twin motion except for the default texture so one of the things that you'll notice is that the texture files do come in I almost 100 not 100 of the time I redo Textures in Twin motion um I've never gotten good results from defaulted textures being carried over to Revit from Revit into twin motion I've almost always redone them from what I hear that's going to change over time with with this with this partnership so so we will see there so now we have this file here right so if I made a modification to this file so I do I do my twin motion thing if I made a modification to this file I have to go back into Revit so if I make my modification let's just say let's just say I modify this um this walkway or walkway this this balcony here I just made the balcony longer now I have to export the data Smith file overwrite override and replace that data Smith file it'll export I'll go back to Twin motion and then I just click refresh here and what you'll see is that file got bigger so kind of like the lumion workflow and honestly before direct link this is this is always horrible so I prefer prefer this a lot of times because I am doing design options a lot and um if you do the the auto sync then you're you're sort of beholden to the Views within Revit and you're a little limited on there so that's that's one way to do it right it's to export the file work on Revit if you're continuing and then and then vice versa load it back in I'm just reading some comments here because uh let's see uh somebody just asked about Revit LT don't know if that's gonna be a thing uh I'm assuming that just because they have the Strategic partnership they're still not going to let you install plugins in Revit LT I apologize I don't work for Autodesk and I have nothing I have no uh I have no say in that decision but just my guess so I'm going to delete this file um delete the the import I'm going to delete the file up here on the right hand side so the other way that you can connect to Revit is synchronizing with with what's called a connection all right so if I click connection here under data Smith sorry it's on the other screen here you can see it's saying no connection found waiting for data data Smith direct link in unreal or twin motion so now if I go into twin motion and I click import and then I say direct link what you'll notice is that this is actually going to show all the Revit files I have open so right now I have one rabbit file open so if I click here it's the same options as the import it's just instead of a geometry I'm doing a direct link so now when I click import remember I am doing this live so let's cross our fingers with everything that I do here and of course I uh I should probably start a new file I screwed that one up so let me uh let me start a new file I screwed that one up because it was the same file and there's a bunch of things going on there so let me just pull back here and I'll check your comments as I reopen twin motion what I was saying is uh you stream streaming streaming uh with with twin motion and Revit live is always a little bit of a risk in any graphic program I'm just uh checking the comments real quick um um there's a Show links in their own file in that menu it does it exports um it exports anything in that view as geometry so yes if there's links it exports it as as singular geometry in your refer file so if you have a REV file that has 30 links in a 3D view it's just going to export as one data Smith file unless you hide and make different views for each link and you export them that way one caveat I will have I will say with with the twin motion exporter that has always existed is you can't batch export views which is a pain in the butt so always been a little bit of an issue even the lumion Luman exporter was the same way so if I create 100 views with all different phases and and whatnot I have to still go through each one and do file export file export file export so pain in the butt there okay so let me let me jump back into the uh direct link here so if I go to import um I should probably get out of this directing thing for Revit here and you can see here's the Revit file here I'll class by material click import and now if I go into Revit the connection should be made oops so here we go so now you can see it's saying here's my connection to Twin motion so it's just getting telling you the status and then you click synchronize and then it synchronizes back and forth so you can see if I go up here now up into space because this Barn is on a mountain so I'm going to just select it press f you can see here it is there it's now the difference here is that yeah I could relinquish here but I could also just make changes let me let me set this up side by side and and go back and forth I will again in full disclosure I I've just never been a direct link fan with with twin motion I'm just hoping that over time we have more functionality um with uh sort of views and phasing and maybe being able to direct link multiple views or something like that then I would 100 use it but now you can see if I take this and I edit then I pull this back and click finish and I hit synchronize here you'll see I don't need to the difference is I don't need to press Refresh on Twin motion that's basically it so you know well you you make the decision on what on what what makes sense for you but uh but those are kind of the two ways those are the two ways to get your Revit models and so that's step one right step one is just getting your Revenue models in so depending on what you're doing right one may be better than the others I again I even in lumion um you know enscape's a little different because uh the way I use enscape and if you fought along with my modern kitchen series that I've been publishing is very much a side-by-side design tool um you know the even then a lot of times I'm pausing enscape to do a whole bunch of changes and then pressing play and so the idea is really that um you know sometimes it's okay to have a frozen moment in time and not the live model but either way um I think I think you've got um you've definitely got options which is okay and from what I can tell with this strategic partnership um that direct link thing is going to be very much more like um more like enscape in the sense of in Live Sync for for lumion in the sense of of a live connection between the two if that's something that you're super interested in um can you do video showing site Logistics plan sure one day I will do a video showing only uh slightly just explains uh does it show their own file in that menu I'm uh John I'm not really sure does it show oh the Show links as their own file no um so once once it's exported in this menu here it does not um but that is the next um the next thing I'm going to show you guys is what what you can do with with the option so one thing for those of you maybe who've used twin Motion in the past but didn't um haven't touched it in a little while one thing you will notice is um there's there's lights uh so if I press G on the keyboard so G hides and shows the um the you know the ucs's and all the stuff so if I'm pressing G you'll see so anything that has a light source now um in Revit uh comes over with a lumion or sorry a twin motion light source in the past um oh sorry I wasn't showing that whatever here we go if you notice here there's a light source there so there's the light source if I hold G turn it on and off you can see there's the light source and then you know there it is there and I don't know if there's one on the inside let me see do I have any lights inside I don't think it did so of course I only had two lights I think in this project they're there right there um so it actually um with the data Smith connection um it is actually showing light sources now so what I want to show you guys now is whether you're doing Live Sync or or data see it's called synchronizing here but I think it's called direct link in in Twin motion but either way you get the idea so live syncing whether you're doing either one of these I did want to talk about the the options you have for importing and what they actually mean so let me let me jump over to the screen and I will show you let me delete this one delete this one I'm going to bring in the non-direct link one just so you can see so if I go back to open and I click it click open okay so what I want to show you is you have some you know you have some options here so obviously this is your selection and then under the options that you're set themselves you have Collapse by material Max UV Precision process all light settings enable substitutions and then the substitution table so more than likely you're going to go with class by material for visualization it's just the easiest way because what you'll see is you're dumping materials on top of it when you're changing materials and that's kind of the default so what that's going to do is take the material name that's important no it is not taking the appearance asset from Revit and I know if you guys have watched any of my custom material videos if you watched when I did materials in the recent modern kitchen one or if we talked about them in any of the other live streams um you'll know you know there's that there's the material and then there's the the appearance asset so this is the material name and that's why you notice that that Barn it's all gray when I brought it in because I just made material names for everything I knew I was going to change in Twin motion but I didn't even bother assigning appearance assets to it so so in in Revit um you know in Revit the shading looks okay right so all my other views look fine um you know you can see this is black this is gray this is brown right but the material asset from this um I didn't even bother with it so if I go into here and of course I'm working on the other monitor and I go to my siding vertical new so this is the black siding that you see there I don't know which screen it's on oh it's way over here you'll notice I have all the graphics but under appearance it's just a default appearance sometimes I'll maybe change it but for the most part I'm just ripping through it making sure that the names over here are unique okay because that's what you're going to bring into twin motion so I'll quickly just bring it in that way um so you guys can see again so I'm going to say class eye material Max UV Precision um to be completely honest with you UV mapping just plain sucks um in in general the first geometry coming out of Revit um and so uh the one thing that they haven't given us from unreal is some of the UV modification tools that exist in unreal you do have some some things but I haven't seen a massive difference between checking and unchecking this but I do know that there's some geometry that it may make a difference so depending on what you're doing you could try either one but I haven't personally seen a big difference and then under process what you'll see is this is this is fairly new actually you can process meshes only you can process lights only or you can process all and then when it brings in the lights what it's doing is it's bringing in the light of the light fixture family it's bringing in the materials of it and then it is bringing the light source but it's converting it to a twin motion light source which is massive because in the past you had to recreate your light sources for artificial lighting into in motion by clicking and placing light source assets in the right location and the other neat thing is um you can also change the intensity on the input and so what you'll notice is that a lot of times when you're doing this all of your lights come in and they're like nuclear bombs went off I don't know what it is it must be something with the transition of of however Revit sets up their wattage or lumens in your families and then however it comes in but they always seem drastically over bright so it is kind of nice you can set it to the TM defaults so or to 300 lumens I don't know if you can change this this default they have there but either way that's really nice enabling substitution is something that um I was going to do a video a while back on substitution tables um but they haven't really made it much easier to understand and so I don't know it's it's extremely complicated uh and extremely complicated uh CSV file but long story short it's this is also pulled from unreal where you can set up a table that says I want this material so let's say it's called grass and Revit to equal this material in the TM palette so then you'll have to apply it Tia makes that substitution for you the problem is the substitution table only exists as as a CSV Excel file that's just stupid complicated and it uses guids of materials so I wouldn't even say I wouldn't even tell you guys to try it out yet until they make a better UI for it in my opinion all right so I'm going to bring this in as a Collapse by material I do see some questions guys so I'll check it out um I already import this so it's going to come in and so what you'll see is um the lights uh over here on the right hand side so this is kind of like think of this as your project browser of all your elements so the lights I'll move my head for a second so you guys don't see me so the lights actually get grouped the the light sources get grouped into a little folder for you and you can see there they are there which is pretty awesome now here's the settings for those lights so I can crank up the lumens and stuff like that which is great if I wanted to turn them off I can just turn them off right here so I'll just turn those off for now and then the rest of these what you'll notice is these are meshes by the Revit material so if I go over here zoom out a little bit so if I turn this obviously Grass Grass property and that's just the material name there's a stone wall over here gravel and so on and so forth so that's how you can actually select and model and manage your models turn things off if you want um you can see I can turn off the asphalt roof all by material so that's one way okay the other way you can bring it in I don't know if I should undo this far let's see I'll just delete it is you can actually not collapse anything so if I go back to import complete that go to open and so if I say keep hierarchy and this is kind of neat depending on what you're trying to do in the program um if I say keep hierarchy which again is right here right there keep hierarchy click import that's fine so instead of showing the you know the geometry obviously comes in exactly the same right but instead of showing it by organizing it by um by material name you'll notice it's actually organizing it by Revit categories and types depending on on how your model set up this is actually kind of new I never saw it by level which is kind of neat so this is actually by level and so you can see it's doing by level or host and then it's giving me different categories and types so I'm just having more flexibility of of uh of selection so again depending on what you want to do that may be something let me close that yeah actually this is new I've never seen it by levels it's kind of cool so you have the ability to select these entire walls which you know has its benefits right there's being able to select this wall separate from the other wall even the same material means that you can actually move the move the geometry in here right which is kind of neat you can take advantage of some of the rotators so if I go to rotate so again depending on what you need to do or what you want to do um oh boy I'm going in this sketch sketch Fab there hold on let's do this animator so if I go to like a rotator for example you know by having by having this separate and if if this was by material it would rotate everything that's the concrete material but because it's not by material I can actually just link this to my object and you can see I can I can actually control um that one wall so you know if you're if you want to open doors and animations and stuff like that then you know bring it in by material doesn't really make much sense but you can see on the right hand side bringing it in by keeping the hierarchy can be Mayhem uh in your in your organization so depending on what you need you know that's just just some again some some uh some need to know so I'm gonna unlink that I'll link that animator for you guys okay so those are those are the two options for for bringing them in um and setting the light values which is which is pretty pretty cool there so let me let me just check I know you guys probably have some questions so let me check before I move on um let me just clear this out and go back to me uh let's see here uh bringing in a bunch of players yeah yeah sorry you're only seeing me I know guys does twin motion work with Bim V60 cloud-based models Etc et cetera et cetera um yes uh if you're if you're asking if the the Revit file can be Revit Cloud workshare then 100 doesn't matter where the file is hosted it could be Central File it could be a local file because remember you're just using the data data link connection you can also um you can also bring in if you have you know Autodesk docs you can also import from you know through the through the um your file explorer and audit a stock so you can't have files you can even have the data Smith files um sitting on docs so um I think that's what you mean so sorry can you sync camera positions um from SketchUp to Twin motion I'm not using SketchUp so I don't know uh camera I I ask you yeah I don't know I I don't think there's any way to sync the camera positions from Revit to Twin motion right now maybe there is I haven't I haven't messed with it um okay cool I think I hit all your all your questions there good good questions guys awesome um do you use the texture map or oh so John Gray was asking about the texture mapper um so like I said um you know because you asked me I'll just quickly show everyone just so you get a sense of what why I decided not to even talk about it really but you know in in typical uh Bim Bim fashion we're all Bim Geeks and this is just what we do um the uh I'll show you what I'll show you what these look like um I had a I had a nice little thing set up somewhere that helped explain it but here we go I basically modified the CSV to make it somewhat understandable but the challenging piece of it here's what the CSV looks like oh that's a crappy one try this again I had one it was nice and highlighted but maybe not so um you can see here let me uh expand this stuff the heart the worst part about it is really there's two there's two pieces that suck um so first is if I zoom in a little bit just so you guys can see um there are instructions up here but um long story short this is the Revit name of the material here so if I if I zoom in so this is the Revit name of the material this is the name as it's imported um um which you notice that twin motion when Imports Revit materials it puts underscores under all the spaces so that sucks so you got to deal with that right uh and then this right here this is the guid of the material in enscape so in order to get this right you have to export a material Library guid file and then copy and paste which one you want so like I said right now it's just super hacked together um uh and once they make it as easy as unreal which is basically a graphic UI saying this material go here I'm not going to use the material table but the fact that it exists is going to be huge in the in the in the long run because if you start setting up templates and have materials built in you could actually start loading files in and have you know fully tweaked up TM you know materials automatically assigned to your models so there's a benefit it's just it's not there yet so I'm not even gonna bother um I did really think about I had an outline and I even started recording a video for but I was like yeah this is this is too much this is uh I wouldn't I wouldn't suggest anyone even attempted you guys can't go for it there's a there's a help file and I'll post a link to the help file in the TM site that has it okay so so we we brought we I showed you the two different ways to bring it in um yeah John said yeah cool would have have a little Windows app yes uh if if if you if you Google John if you Google uh unreal's uh material table it exists already as a UI and unreal and it's beautiful um actually I think if memory serves me right it's actually wired together like a visual programming uh but for some reason when they brought it over to TM they just gave us the ability to use this CSV file instead of the UI and so I've already mentioned that multiple times to the dev so maybe one day we'll get it because it is huge it is it is super valuable if you want to use strictly TM materials which I suggest for high quality stuff especially if you start using path Tracer then then you want to use TM materials uh and then mapping them with your typical materials and Revit is just a no-brainer but um not there yet okay so uh so I'm perfectly uh perfect transition here let's let's talk about uh materials then so let me let me jump back into TM for you guys so we talked about um the two different approaches to Bringing models in right one is export import and then refresh uh the other one is direct sync and then refresh on on the Revit side or Refresh on the TM side either way I think it pushes it either way so basically the two ways to do it um so now once your model is in what do you do right once your model is in the best your best bet is to assign materials and so I'm just gonna I'm not gonna sign a ton of materials I'm just gonna go through some of the pros and cons and some of the things that I've learned when it comes to assigning materials just show you some of the the neat ways to um the neat ways to or some of the things I've learned I should say with materials and making them look good so I'm going to jump this thing to Collapse by material I'm going to process all set values yeah yeah import Dynamo for TM Sean actually if you uh if you look up unreal which so the reason I keep saying unreal friend who's not familiar is Twin motion is actually built on on the unreal uh game uh gaming engine which is owned by epic which makes sense why they bought twin motion which is probably long term their their goal uh maybe to try and get some some of us to use unreal not just twin motion but either way most of unreal is actually visual programming wire framing connections uh for scripts and everything it's very much Dynamo looking so um none of that's in TM at this moment in time but um the features are which is not those those ways of setting up so but yes it's funny you should say that because if you just Google any like Google like uh action scripts in in unreal or material tables or mapping and unreal or something or you can look at actually um I don't remember what episode it was but episode I have an episode of bam after dark live where um my guest came on and talked about uh unreal and Revit um so I'll put a link to that as well and you can see he's tying together wireframes and stuff like that okay so when it comes to materials um it's actually pretty straightforward uh when actually how to apply them when you uh when you bring it in Collapse by material so if I you see here it's collapsed by material so I have grass through here I'm going to move I'm going to hide this one over and I'll pull this one over a little bit so there's a couple ways you can do it um one way is you can press t on your keyboard which is the eyedropper and then you can select your material and you'll see it pulls it up down here on the bottom and so that's just an eyedropper if I go through you see this is called sash this is called asphalt to shingle right so that's kind of how you can pick through it the other way is you can just drag and drop onto your models to start so there's two areas for materials in in Twin motion as long as you use any twin motion ones and not the default Revit ones even though you know like this is a default Revit one you can see it came in but notice the potato quality of it even if I try like bumping up Reflections and adding bump it's just it's not going to do it but it's as simple as going over to Wood and let's just dump on you know this this wood material for some reason the scale is almost always off I don't know why I've tried a thousand different ways if someone in the comments or re watching this in the future knows how to modify that there's no settings in the export there's no settings in the import other than that UV mesh thing so the scale of materials when you bring in a revifile and you apply a TM material is almost always off and it's literally almost always off by like 15 to 20. but this is the the real trick here is if you look at my mouse down here in the bottom right so scale is set to one right the trick is and this isn't a great example but TM has this weird thing where if you slide These Bars which is nice as a UI right it increases things they all have a Max they have a threshold right so if if you were to you know this isn't a great example but let's say I wanted this to be you know these look kind of like maybe six inch boards maybe I want these to be 10 inch boards right well I want to scale it further I don't know how right so so even though these all have a threshold um which someone baked in at some point in time you can actually type in a number bigger than the threshold so if I want this to be 15 I just type in 15 and press enter and it does it so that's a lesson learned thing for you in most of the settings in TM go that way there's a threshold when you're sliding sliders but in almost all cases you can type in a value that's more than the threshold why don't we don't have any idea but as a veteran to an motion user I wanted to tell you that because that's something extremely important for you guys to know so now you can see um I I you know I cranked it up to 15 you can see I could change the reflection you can see already we're starting to get some nice nice effects on the wood grain um you know the colors here so just to show you some of the settings in materials I'll hide my face for a second um what I was changing was the scale here if you go under each of these there's some more you can add grunge which is just kind of like this dirty dirty piece to it you can add you know reflection Maps here so this is default reflection map so you can really dial down how you want these materials this is the UV really the UV that I was talking about um you have the ability to rotate to change axis and to make a move so you can you can modify the UV mapping to some extent obviously if you're getting a more complex geometry it gets a little more challenging but but you do have some options there and then under settings you have bump Maps you have glows you have metallic you have two-sided you have x-ray you have all these different settings you can see bump map is is uh you know exactly what you guys know it as which hopefully you guys can see that there if you look at the wood grain you know if I crank that up or down there's my bump map if I go under more one of the things they've also added here is this tool called parallax and so if I turn that on um you have to have the right material this material doesn't have a parallax but Parallax is essentially displacement and so you can see this doesn't have its generic so it doesn't have a parallax but it has if it has a displacement map like a stone maybe I'll throw a stone on here um you can actually um add displacement to it so that's what the Parallax setting is but um I just really the the key takeaway there is the scaling and being able to type it in because if you put brick in there and you scale up to 10 and you're like well that's a three inch long brick I need it to be eight inches long what the hell you might need to type in 15. I usually find 10 to 15 is is where it is and it's not even consistent so maybe someone can in the in the dev group or in the beta I can ask and tell me so so I just go through and apply and so under materials you can start with um you know start with a defaulted material and modify it if you want so um you know go to that the other area where you have materials which is super cool [Music] um oh Junior just mentioned that setting is the same with unreal I'm assuming you're talking about the type in so unreal is the same way where it has a threshold and they type in that's really bizarre I don't I mean I guess as a programmer maybe you're like I'll build in kind of like an auto in Revit when they they have those really small icons for like site settings and stuff you know they don't want everyone to be able to know where it is okay so um you know I'll go through and you can apply some materials here um you know if I wanted to apply different Woods if I wanted to apply uh you know a TM glass which I think it usually gets converted glass yeah glass usually gets converted you could change the opacity and stuff like that um but there's another area for materials so um I've actually done a lot of great stuff with just the out of the box materials in TM which you can see I'm just scrolling through some of them here wall coverings and then even if just flipping out images if you need to but one of the things that epic did a while ago is they they uh I don't know if it was a merger or acquisition of quixel Mega scans quixel Mega scans and so with that you actually get not only these really cool assets which I'll talk about later but you also get materials that are scanned materials so if I click wood and I go to board and I make sure I'm signed into my epic games account you can see now we have a access to not only our default twin motion Library we have access to these um these Mega scan materials so these are seamless materials that were created using scanning technology so they're not just photos but they're photos with the displacement maps and everything pulled from you know actual real-life objects so if I download one of these and while it's downloading I take a look yeah Junior just mentioned yeah so that's it so now I can take these and I can actually just drag and drop them on the same way I drag and drop a regular twin motion um material notice the scale is off see scales off a little bit that's actually not the greatest one so if I type in 15 well that's 15 is too big we'll go on here what you'll notice is now you've got you know all these great materials that you can work with that's actually not a really nice one for the facade but um and you could you know then you have all the same settings you have rehab reflection you have a color overlay you could have grunge you could have all this cool stuff um you know bump Maps it's all built into there um this one does have Parallax so I'm going to try and get a good view for you guys you can see it here we go let's do this let's crank up the Reflection by the way if you ever want to see more like bump and stuff uh adding reflection is always nice so this has a parallax map which means under bump if I click more my face was in the way sorry guys Parallax map is right here so hopefully you guys can see what's happening here so um when I'm when I'm looking like this and I turn this on what you'll notice is it's actually it's actually doing a crazy displacement map of of the of the object so it's basically hopefully you can see it like right here in this board if you look right at that joint there watch the difference between what that joint is doing and not it's the other boards so it's a it's an artificial displacement of the material so stone brick like all kinds of stuff you can get some really really really neat stuff there um let's see yes John they have not only uh scanned materials but they have scanned objects too and the material library is out of control so one of the things you could literally spend days searching through the qixel mega scans library and now the sketchfab library it's the entire sketchfab Library directly in Twin motion it is just Bonkers how much content you have in here and so what I actually did with this with this um let me just make sure I'm hitting all my so what I'll do is I'll open this final file real quick before I jump in just so you guys can see what I did with with this final file of this of this Barn is I actually tested myself to only use quicksome Mega scans um for uh for applying materials and this is when it first came out and so I wanted to see like how much can that improve on on what you see uh yes so Junior just made a great a great tip there which is um and this is this is actually a good tip for for um anything in Twin motion because the libraries are so dense searching is actually pretty good it doesn't do a bad job but definitely if you use uh if you're using something a lot like let's say there's three trees that you use all the time you can favorite them by hitting this little heart here which I'll show you in a second well actually it's still loading so I'll wait till it's done loading so you can favorite them and then it makes them easy to find so materials like any any area you're in where you find yourself reusing something over and over again you can actually favorite them sorry if there's a little lag that's because twin motion's running and I have the fans low so my computer is probably overheating so you guys don't hear this crazy uh thing taking off but uh um so definitely favorite them so I have I have favorites yes we're open now awesome um so here here's kind of this is actually that final scene um of that of the project that we were talking about so I'll keep jumping back and forth between the final scene and and and other stuff but um what you'll notice if I zoom into some of these materials you know look at that that wood material so every material assigned to this is a other than the glass I guess is a quixel um mega scan material um which is which is pretty awesome um so as far as saving what what uh junior just mentioned um so anything if if I hit this heart here you'll notice I have saved objects right so if you're in the beginning and you hit the heart it's going to show everything that you save if you're in the object so if I'm if I'm in a material which I don't have any same material so if I go to vegetation and I hit the heart it's going to show only vegetation that I that I that I saved so it's a really good way if you're using stuff all the time by the way these are the three trees that absolutely if you're if you're in New England and you're making scenes I 100 suggest that these are the three trees that you use all the time there's no reason to use any of the trees in New England that's what I use in these scenes it's probably not missing so it's a Nico fur a laurel and a home Oak but either way what you notice is that so as I'm saving things I can either see them in my main screen which these are obviously buried all throughout different categories of it or I can jump in and see them so if I like a material if I like this metal material here I hit the heart and then when I'm in materials if I hit the heart you can see it's going to be right there if I'm in the library if I hit the heart it's going to be there and same applies for qixel and any anywhere in this so that's a really good tip there Junior um awesome the threshold is and then I'm hoping that somebody uh do they have dead plants for New Mexico they have lots of dead plants actually John one of one of actually one of the coolest things in the mega scan Library are these like dead dead branches and stuff they have here I'll I'll add one for you since you mentioned so if I go into 3D assets and I go to Nature and I go to let's do trees and I can go to uh Fallen that's one way there's a whole bunch of dead trees right here for you um so because you mentioned I will show it it wasn't kind of on my outline because it's not really a neat to know for Revit uses but it's really freaking cool so um these are the mega scan assets so if I download one of these Mega scan assets these are assets there's a whole library of twin motion assets you can use that are great and there's animated ones and all kinds of cool stuff these are the mega scan ones so these are scanned assets right so you'll obviously get a completely different level of detail as far as textures are concerned so I'm just going to place this fallen tree foreign I have a I have some pretty tall grass here so let me just pull this up for you guys zoom in a little bit I'll scale it up so another tip uh for anyone in uh who maybe hasn't used twin motion a lot so this this little uh you know widget here or UCS whatever you want to call it um you know it has things that you can do right it's up and down if you press tab on it which as Revit uses I'm sure we're all gonna do anyways right uh if you press tab it does different things so this is moving different access if you press tab again it scales and if you press tab again it does this so you can tap through different options for that UCS so that's kind of what I'm doing here so what you'll notice if I zoom into this is that this scanned object is just crazy crazy crazy detail um so that's that's what the the quicksil mega scan stuff does and if I press R it'll render it out you can see it's pretty sweet okay so let me uh I shouldn't have done that live okay does does twin motion have the ability to have multiple uses working in the same model are seen at the same time no it doesn't um it looks like junior said yes I don't know if you know something more than me but you can you can import Revit models in different scenes but you cannot have more than one person working in this specific scene as far as I know unless there's some sort of beta that I don't know about but no and actually I will say again because this is a need to know thing um you know sharing twin motion scenes between users is is can be goofy sometimes too because of local pathing and and assets and stuff like that um there is uh again this is I wasn't planning on talking about this but I'll just show you guys there is a um under the file options over here there is a tool called a resource collector and I think there's a another way to do it too but um in which it packages everything as a zip file together and that's your best best bet to do it um so um you can share libraries though so I have custom custom asset libraries that we can share between users but otherwise you can't work in the same scene okay I talked about applying materials now so I'm trying to think if there's anything else for materials that I really want you guys to know that was kind of the big that was kind of the big thing there um was was making sure the the um making sure the the the scaling thing was understood because I know that burns a lot of people with a lot of Revit uses I should say um and again just sort of zoom into some of these materials to show you how nice they look these are just quick little Mega scan materials on uh on Revit assets if I go inside I think that the concrete looks pretty good you can see there's there's the concrete there and so remember this is live so this is not path traced okay so this is live just live uh twin motion scene so this does not have any Ray tracing happening right now so you can see it looks pretty good there's a little gamification of it because it's not Ray traced you can see that that asphalt shingle there so these are all quicksome Mega scans applied to Revit mm-hmm okay uh sorry if there was if there was some lag I'm I don't know if that was for you Junior personally or if it's for everyone else there may be some lag because of the sense that I'm I'm using twin motion um in Revit and streaming and all this good stuff um oh uh is UA ue5 does if if you if unreal if unreal has multi-user um workflows then I guess you could there's there's actually a bridge between twin motion unreal um and uh as far as I know it's actually come a long way and it works pretty good um and like like actually really well especially if you do most of the work in Twin motion pull it over um so I guess then yes if you want to do that and learn unreal then go for it okay um so the one thing I wanted to touch on um uh is uh also with vegetation and working with Revit and placing a vegetation and stuff like that because again just trying to think of of tips and tricks and some of some of these things are things that um might have burned me in the past and actually some of them were fixed but one thing that I have done a lot of is I will bring in the the site in the building as separate Imports um and part of the reason for that is you have a couple options for applying vegetation so trees grass plants whatever right excuse me and um sometimes if you're refreshing a lot and again this has actually been fixed quite a bit compared to the past but it still happens from time to time if you're refreshing your model a lot and maybe the context isn't changing sometimes because the if you use vegetation scatter or vegetation paint it's using the surface of the topography as its host so to speak I have had stuff disappear so so because the the surface gets refreshed sometimes your whole floors will disappear so a tip there is to export your site separate from your model and bring them both into twin motion as two separate Imports so that when your chain making changes to the architecture you're refreshing the model and not the site all that being said um I can show real quickly how I how I did the foliage on this guy might might be useful um so let me turn off let's each here's my painted vegetation there's the barn so what you'll see here is I have a mix between painted vegetation manually placed vegetation and Scattered vegetation okay so those are kind of the three options you have so scattered vegetation is super cool um I'll actually you know what I'm gonna do I'm gonna I'm going to take let's do this let's take my surface no I'll just do it up here so the way the way scattered vegetation works is it actually it actually oh sorry guys was the mic doing something weird hopefully it's okay now I've been having issues with my uh my audio interface and I thought it was the auto interface but it must be the computer because this is the second audio interface and it's still doing it but hopefully it's not doing it anymore for you guys if it is let me know hit redirected all the power to process uh does it sound okay now guys all over the game a little bit too okay so um what I really just wanted to show you is that um you can oh it's still bad okay hold on bear with me it's still workable I'm glad I'm glad it's still workable hold on hopefully that's better or maybe worse let's see that sounds good for you guys all right well we're just gonna work with it I apologize if the audio is awful for some reason it sounds fine in my ears but uh it may be a different different input so okay so so when it comes to placing vegetation scattered vegetation is actually scattering vegetation across a material so uh the other thing to think about is in your Revit models when it comes to vegetation what you'll notice how it says it comes and gone weird it's proud to process the scene I don't know what it is uh so I apologize guys take a sip a drink okay I'm drinking water instead of the beer is that the problem maybe that's the problem okay so one of the things you'll notice in my Revit scenes is that I don't just have grass right all across here I have a couple different topos sub-regions and part of that is because you'll notice this one is called Forest um you know forest and then this one is called grass uh this one so the reason for that is scattered vegetation is actually placing a object across a surface it's scattering the absolute across the surface so by doing this you can take advantage of having all these multiple um all these multiple materials in order to in order to bring in uh to bring in vegetation and build your scene really quickly so if I quickly if I quickly removed my scattered vegetation here let me zoom out so what you'll notice here is my Forest has a few different scatters and because of that um oops because of that I can quickly Place trees on this material here right which is which is my my uh my whatever uh um Forest material so so long story short uh if I go to vegetation scatter I can quickly pop in um you know some some trees so I just throw and I want these these three trees um and then I select these three trees you can actually do density by by tree which is kind of neat so let me hide my face so you guys can see me so you can you can do uh density by tree after the fact but for now I'll just grab these three I'll press plus and when I place it you'll notice it's only placing the forest on that material and so that's the keys if you just did all grass right then then you wouldn't be able to do that right it would fill the whole scene and so that's something uh that you can change a little bit of of how you how you place your eye or how you build your Revit models in order to understand how you can more quickly build forest and whatnot uh around your scene same thing with grass right so if I wanted this you could see this real this real grass and all this stuff in here um it's because I I didn't fill the whole scene with it I only did it where I needed to if you don't want to fill the whole scene with something like grass um what you can do is you can paint it on so you'll notice if I look at the scene and I go way back here I don't have any grass back here because doing vegetation scatter across that wasn't snow uh sorry I just saw that question that wasn't snow I just didn't change the material of that Forest that this is a working uh this is a file that has multiple things going on for this live scene so that that that's just the material is white sorry um if you want to turn snow on you can uh for anyone interested you can quickly go over to to weather and you can change it to uh to snow just like that they actually improved quite a bit the snow bias so you'll notice like see how there's no snow underneath that overhang and stuff like that which is kind of cool um you can see you can make it do that too because you said it I figured I would show you but whatever a little rain a little snowy and rain I'm sure that's good I'm sure that's good what uh my future holds to this winter in New England but okay so uh what I was saying is when it comes to things like grass um for example you may not want to do a vegetation scatter across the whole thing to get a really good grass so what I do a lot is I use painted vegetation for that and painted vegetation is exactly what it sounds like um you would just paint on your vegetation so if I go over here and I go to vegetation paint I can throw on I can throw on grass so if I go over grass I can throw on a couple different kinds but for now I'll do this and then you're just painting it onto the surface like that okay A little tip there is that you can isolate just isolate the grass material in rabbit and then you can just paint on top of it and then this way you're only painting a certain area instead of vegetation scatter so that's that's a nice little tip there so that's how I put this grass in and part of the reason I did that is I also randomly scattered little painting areas of like dandelions and stuff so if you look closely um you know you'll be able to see there's some some clovers and dandelions and you know stuff like that scattered throughout this whole scene that just adds a little a little something something to the scene okay um so the last thing um before before we start wrapping up because oh she's starting out crazy huh the last thing uh that I wanted to talk about is the visual the visual settings before we talk about path Tracer uh so so we kind of talked about bringing in the bringing in the model um you know bringing two different ways to bring in the model um some materials tips and tricks for Revit users some site tips and tricks some vegetation tips and tricks right we talked about all that stuff so now you built your scene but now you know it doesn't look that great it's flat it's not you know whatever um so there's a couple tips and tricks to just making this look good and look less gamey is kind of the the thought that I have there so I do have some very specific visual settings which I will um I will post on the blog post for this tomorrow morning which are the light settings um the uh camera settings and whatnot so I mean I can quickly go through them but there is sort of one one quick thing is to definitely definitely use a skylight um hdri so by default uh twin motion will be dynamic lights and I mean just look at the difference of the scene right there right look at that difference okay so that's just using Skylight HDR um you know this ambient settings all that stuff is one thing and then I usually end up doing um for my visual effects I end up doing a little bit more contrast a little less saturation and all that good stuff otherwise for the most part this is pretty pretty default so I will share all all of these settings in the blog post tomorrow but the key is 100 no matter what make sure you're using the hdri skies because then you have an actual um uh seeing that that reflects the color and the gradient of the sky around it the one thing that you do need to know is that if you're going to use path Tracer so like I mentioned before this is not uh a rendered scene right this is this is a real a real scene I should probably turn on all my Entourage again huh let me turn on my answer Rush right so this is this is a live seat and this is not Ray traced so now in Twin motion you do have the ability to do ray tracing or path Tracer it's called and so if I turn that on what you'll notice immediately is that the sun settings for your real-time View and the sun settings for your path Trace views are usually not exactly lined up um I say that not exactly because sometimes they do sometimes they don't um but for the most part they're not always lined up and for some reason it always cranks the sun intensity down when you when you switch it so what you'll notice is if I just turn this up a little bit I'll turn exposure up a little bit foreign this is going to be brutal by the way if I'm trying to do this live so what this is doing is it's actually path tracing right so I usually won't work in a live scene path traced um other than setting the settings I'll work I'll work uh R is the keyboard shortcut by the way so by pressing R you can see it's turning on turning off um just because obviously you can see even with the 30 30 90 whatever I have in this thing it's still it's still requiring a lot of stuff and that's on the low settings but what you can do is you can create your image and your video views to have path Tracer in them so then those are the ones that you export to so if I go to this view here you'll notice this view is already set up with with path trace lightings and settings and so on and so forth and so it's going to render it out so then it's good to go so R is the keyboard shortcut to turn it on um your settings for your real-time View and your settings for your path Trace view are kind of going to be different so I basically set up my camera and my video and whatever my export views are to be the path Trace ones that I want and then I set my light settings for my real-time view to the light settings the real-time view if you guys want to see just what this final one looks like path traced so it doesn't blow it up I'll show you real quickly uh let's see final renderings where are you final final Final right final final fighter okay ah these are some of them but that's okay so this is once once they're rendered out um you know this is kind of a sense of what of what the path Trace looks like so you can see it's got It's this is Ray Trace now right so you can see it's got much more depth it's got It's got softer shadows and so on and so forth so now you have the ability to do this from there and all of these images came out and you know a matter of of minutes so it's not like it adds so much time but you could see it adds it adds quite a bit there so you definitely want your final exports if you're doing images to potentially take advantage of path tracing if your video card can handle it but I the the tip there is definitely making sure that you um definitely making sure that your light settings for your path Trace versus your non-path Trace views are probably going to be different as far as you can tell um awesome I'm just checking out this stuff here TM is the bomb yes it is Junior if you place five of the same grass while using vegetation paint tool does the density increase yes if if you if you recreate the vegetation paint over and over again it can but you can get it pretty dense I want to worry about the density if I were you the scattering I like it's just a performance thing if you if you don't need to scatter grass across your entire site then I just want it just because grass is just you think about you know the amount of geometry for grass it just does it just doesn't make sense to me plus uh unless you're path tracing um the grass is going to fade away in the distance anyways that's just the way the game engines work yes uh the one thing I didn't mention or show is and maybe this because it's already 10 10 um is maybe I'll do a whole nother episode on sort of uh animation um animation uh stuff with it because that's the one thing that I would say um uh I'm I'm a fan of both enscape and twin motion I use them both all the time they have they both have their advantages that the animation side of of events of twin motion is super cool as well as some of the the cloud stuff can you Orient the same um uh in different directions so if if you want to orient the the UV of the different objects in different directions um the UV controls the entire material name so you just need to have two different material names in Revit so what I mean by that that's actually a really good question so what I mean by that is uh if I was to modify of course I'm going to path Trace view let me get out of this here so if I wanted you notice that these are these are oriented in two different directions um that's just the way they came out of Revit right but they're the same material if I wanted this to be unique from this guy then they need to be different material names if I go over here and I already and I rotate it the other one's going to rotate too you see they're both rotating so if I wanted the top floor to rotates up from the bottom floor then I need the top floor to be a different material than the bottom floor because they're coming in by material name Junior already answered you awesome sweet uh so uh I think the only things I had on my list that I wanted to talk about which I think maybe I'll just save for another session or a different YouTube video is uh just some of the options for sharing the information now so there's some really great live um live model viewers uh that they've that they have a browser-based live model viewers um renderings animations all that cool stuff so so maybe we'll we'll save that for another time I hope this was a super helpful um video for you guys as you as you guys embark on your twin motion Journeys because it's going to be handed to you apparently as Revit users I'm hoping that um I I made it a little easier for you guys to jump in so um with that I think I hit everyone's questions um feel free to reach out reach out to me um somebody mentioned VR by the way yes you can this is also works with the VR goggles as well um so so that that also works too but feel free to comment in the video below with questions reach out to me on Twitter and definitely check out community.bimafterdark.com I actually do have a twin motion course as well as a bunch of topics on Twin motion so you can definitely hop over there but take advantage of that uh 30 off deal for the rest of the year um thank you guys for joining me uh next week it won't be just me there'll be a guest so stay tuned uh Thursday nights at 9 00 PM for episode 82. uh make sure you subscribe to the channel if you enjoy this content also check out for the modern kitchen series there's a couple more episodes left in this season um as as we work our way towards the client meeting so um thanks guys I really appreciate this I enjoyed it and I hope you did too and with that I'll see y'all soon [Music] thank you [Music] foreign

Channel: TheRevitKid

Views: 27,310

Keywords: revit, revit design, autodesk revit, revit tutorial, revit tip, revit tutorials, revit architecture, BIM, architect, architectural design, bimafterdark, bimafterdarklive, From Revit to Twinmotion - What You *NEED* to Know., revit to twinmotion, from revit to twinmotion, revit to twinmotion tutorial, twinmotion tutorial, twinmotion rendering, twinmotion settings, rendering in twinmotion, twinmotion path tracing

Id: XdeCOhFI5FU

Length: 71min 20sec (4280 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 06 2022