Importing Twinmotion Files to UNREAL ENGINE - Step by Step Tutorial!

what's up guys justin here with the renderingessentials.com back with another twin motion tutorial for you so if you remember a couple weeks ago i made a video about a new um beta plug-in that they've released which allows you to take your renderings from twin motion to unreal engine well i thought i'd make a video kind of walking you through following the instructions so that you can export your first file so that you can test it out so let's go ahead and just jump into it alright so first things first you can find this importer in the unreal engine marketplace i will link to this in the notes down below but if you click on this button for external link it's going to take you to a folder where you can download some different things so it's going to take you to a folder where you can download the public beta plugins folder as well as some instructions on how this should work and so we're basically just going to follow these instructions in this video kind of see what we can do with this so we're going to scroll down so it gives you kind of an overview but where we want to start is make sure that you have the newest versions of unreal engine and twin motion and you want to download these plugins from this location right here specifically these three and then what it wants you to do is it wants you to take those files or folders and it wants you to copy them from the twin motion folder right here over into your unreal engine plugins folder and so when you're done that's going to look something like this you're going to have your unreal engine folder with the version that you're using inside of engine you're going to go into plugins you're going to make a folder called twin motion and you're going to put these three files inside of that folder so you're going to want to do all of that before you open up unreal engine all right so next step is we need to open up unreal engine and enable the plugins so inside of unreal engine we're going to create a new project so i'm going to go with this aec right here click on next and we'll just go with blank for right now i don't really want it to drop all this extra stuff in here so we're just going to create a blank project and we'll just call this twin motion test and then you can set this up with ray tracing enabled or disabled i'm leaving it as disabled just because we're not going to do a lot of high quality rendering in this this is more an example file and i'm going to say no starter content just to reduce the size of the project it creates then click on the button for create project that is going to pop up an unreal engine window where we can then enable the plugins all right so next step we want to manage our plugins so we're going to turn this plugin on so we're going to go to settings plugins and if you put those in the folder they should show up down below so i'm just going to type in twin motion and we want to check the box for all three of these notice how this says this is a beta version so we're going to enable this enable this enable this and then we're going to click on restart now because you have to restart the editor for these changes to take effect alright so now that this is set up what we want to do is we want to import a scene and so now that that plugin is turned on what we want to do is we want to use the option for data smith so i'm going to click on data smith right here and then we're going to go find a file to bring in and we'll go ahead and use the file that they're talking about which is the materials room that's in here um the materials room is the default example file that comes with twin motion so we're just gonna go find twin motion real quick and within twin motion there's a twin motion folder with content and let's go to demo scenes and so we're just going to bring in this materials room file so we're just going to double click to bring that in and it's going to ask us where to put this and so i'm just going to put this in the collections folder and click on ok and so what this is going to do is this is going to give us the standard data smith import options these are the options that data smith or that twin motion gives us for things that we can import so you can see how you can import the geometry the materials lights cameras and animations as well as some other options down here which i'm not really going to mess with for right now but what i'm going to do is i am just going to click on the button for import all right so one thing that you're going to know is you're going to get a log when you bring this in of things that aren't supported and remember if we scroll down to the bottom of this page like this notice how there are a lot of things that aren't supported yet so they talk about that i think it's a waze down here so things like skeletal meshes and vehicles are not currently working so there's some things that just won't come in yet remember this is in beta so that's kind of to be expected read through this if you have any questions about what's working and what isn't but let's go ahead let's close out of this and let's take a look at what we've got so i'm going to move forward with the w key and we're just going to fly into this building kind of take a look so and notice how by the way this uh this materials room file now shows up in my collections which is where i told it to put this so the materials themselves for the materials room have all been brought in and set up which we can take a little bit more of a look at in a second but let's go ahead and just fly into this building take a look so you can see how these materials have been brought in and they're actually showing up really in a realistic way so the cool thing about this is let's take a look at let's take a look at this object right here so i'm going to click on it and then over here we can take a look at this material so if i double click on this material this is going to open the materials editor so it's already set up things like the normal map that have been set up inside of twin motion so that's one thing that's really cool about this is you don't have to go through and set up your materials which can be super time consuming inside of unreal engine instead this just did this automatically and notice how it's like interacting with the light other things like that so what this is doing is this is basically bringing these in and setting them up without you having to do any of the complicated node setup or anything like that so notice how there were if i was to click into that again some folders in here where you could apply like a roughness map or a metallic map so if you want to add additional maps in here so once this is set up this menu is going to allow you to do that so you could just check the box roughness map then you could go find a file and you would have to probably upload the file into the content folder but you could load a file in here to add additional information to this asset and so let's take a look real quick the outliner over here so the outliner you can see shows us what objects have been brought in and where they're at so we can take a little bit closer look at this but you can see how these are all being brought in as actors and static mesh actors so that's basically just the way that unreal engine looks at objects so we can talk about that more in the future but for right now i want to focus more on the results that we're getting so the really cool thing about this is you could go through and this basically makes it so people who don't have a bunch of technical knowledge can set things up inside of twin motion and then bring them into unreal engine for um rendering where you get access to more of the advanced features again notice how some of the like cars and other things like that are not yet supported alright so now and we can talk a little bit more about actually creating scenes i think it probably makes sense for me to get back into that now that we have this way of bringing things in a little bit easier but let's say for example that we've got our objects in here and we want to like swap out materials and stuff you can now fully edit these inside of unreal engine so for example if i was to select this grass in here you could take one of these materials from your materials room objects or options you can drag it over into the materials and replace that and render it into unreal engine but the real power of this now being able to bring these in and notice again that there are things that aren't working right now the real power of this is you can actually use unreal engine's functions in order to make a better rendering so for example one of the things in twin motion that currently isn't working is you can't add an hdri backdrop well you could bring in your twin motion file drag that hdri backdrop in here so we're just going to bring that in move it down a little bit and that backdrop is now in here but i could turn my sun off so my artificial sun right here and then i could brighten up my hdri backdrop just by coming into my settings and adjusting the intensity up you can see how now we're getting a much more realistic lighting result in here because we can use that hdri backdrop and we can swap that out so what this does is this this gives us access to some of the additional features inside of unreal engine that aren't in twin motion so if you have a scene you need to take the next level but you don't want to spend a ton of time setting up all these materials you can do that with this plug-in so for now download this and give it a try and then let me know what you think remember that it is in beta so not everything is going to be working but i think this goes a long way towards what we've been waiting for which is the ability to use twin motion to kind of set up a scene because it's a lot easier and faster and then take it into unreal engine to do some advanced things now i haven't quite figured out because there are some advanced things you need to know about unreal engine in order to be able to create those final scenes so that may be something we talked through a little bit more on the channel of some of the settings but i'm excited to see where this goes and i'm excited to hear what you guys think about this so 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 rendering 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: The Rendering Essentials

Views: 21,769

Keywords: rendering tutorials, SketchUp rendering, Vray Rendering, the rendering essentials, therenderingessentials, rendering lessons, photorealistic rendering tutorials, architectural visualization, twinmotion, twinmotion unreal engine, twinmotion unreal plugin

Id: 5UcL30ibFtQ

Length: 10min 11sec (611 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 20 2021