Managing LARGE & COMPLEX Sites in Revit and Twinmotion, Live!

[Music] hey what's up everyone jeff here also known as the revit kid welcome to another episode of bim after dark live thank you for joining us uh if you're from new to the show welcome um bim after dark live is a weekly live stream here on youtube where it's either myself or myself and some guests or one guest or two guests but we just chat about all things revit bim and any really related uh software so if it's your first time here uh thank you for joining us really i do appreciate it make sure you subscribe to the channel and hit the little notification button we're actually rolled over 38 000 subscribers here on youtube which is pretty wild actually um i think we started uh when we started this live stream i think we were down at like 17 or 19 000 so pretty cool thank you and for those of you returning and subscribers thank you for joining me again um cheers to you uh i love doing the nighttime ones because it's uh more acceptable to drink although i know depending on where you guys are from the in the world i know we've got some people in australia some folks from texas those even texas i'm sorry to hear what you're going through hopefully you guys are staying warm safe and if you do lose power or internet during the stream don't worry the replay will be available on the blog tomorrow so um i'm actually staring at four inches of snow right now outside of my house it's been a nonstop snow fest here in new england as well this year so um i feel ya look we got a ton of people here in the chat awesome hello from tijuana whoa tijuana it's probably a little warmer there than it is here i can tell you that atlanta um awesome awesome awesome awesome great uh sorry that the sound uh chris that the intro is a little loud i apologize uh i try to make sure all the levels are pretty adjusted but maybe your volume was cranking maybe your jam is into some tunes philip chans here what's up phil um so today we're gonna talk about some cool stuff uh before i jump into uh the sponsor of this episode and the content i wanted to sort of introduce it just a little bit um it's it's kind of an interesting topic to to figure out how to navigate and so what i thought i would do is with this live with this live setup you know we have the ability to interact as you notice i'm always in the chat i'm reading the chat as we go along um and so you know feel free to ask questions and jump in and i'm going to try to feed off of you guys as well but um it's one of those things where on a daily basis on my on my day job um where where we're creating um very large uh logistics plan and site logistics and phasing plans um we've been using a lot of twin motion to do that and and uh you know almost a year now of using twin motion to do this we have a lot of interesting lessons learned but also we do all of our modeling and revit and so what i'm going to try and do today is just sort of give you a glimpse behind the curtain of how how we create these pretty large complex scenes and some of the lessons learned with making these aerial beautiful aerial images models and scenes but also you know how it handles on the revit side and sort of how all this interacts and so i'm gonna try to make sure this thing stays on stays on point and and but it is a topic that can go all over the place so um i i uh i welcome all of your chats questions and so on um but uh but i am also gonna try and keep it on point so we'll see how that goes um bernardo just asked do you prefer uh twin motion over lumion check out all of my previous videos we've talked about this many many times for what i'm showing you today which is specifically these large-scale site logistics and phasing plans type of thing in scenes where there's multiple and lots of different pieces moving and sequences and phasings going on 100 twin motion if you're talking about going down and creating a beautiful rendering of a 400 square foot house um then you know the competition is different uh because you may not need all these different layers and visibilities and control over and the flexibility that twin motion has and lumion may get the job done or enscape but check out i did extensive videos um last year so check out live.bimafterdark.com to scroll through all those and you'll see what uh what um what i say about that maybe maybe for the year anniversary maybe i'll do uh because i think the very first live stream i ever did was a a real-time rendering royal rumble and i sort of talked about the the four or three major players that i think exist which are enscape twin motion lumion and i kind of gave a little little briefing on those so maybe i'll uh maybe i'll do that again for the one year anniversary we'll see oh man honolulu hawaii welcome man uh or woman sorry i don't know your username doesn't doesn't give me an idea of a gender but welcome definitely jealous for that okay um and susannah actually susanna duarte how's it going um just uh said where is your last name from um and it is my my father was born in portugal um so it is a portuguese last name i am portuguese so uh all right before we jump into it um let's thank bimbox who is our sponsor i'm gonna roll the clip and then we'll talk a little bit of inbox and we're gonna jump into the content so take a look at this awesome clip [Music] so there you have it bimbox is the official sponsor of this live stream i want to thank them for sponsoring first of all but i also want to let you know about bimbox um bimbox is exactly what it sounds like it's a box for bim it is a computer desktop or laptop they have two a couple different models but two mainly that have been designed and optimized for revit so you name it these things crank they've got pretty much whatever you want in there but the great thing about it is they have been designed and optimized for revit um and if you don't believe me you can actually go on to if you head over to bimbox.bimafterdark.com you can actually take a uh they have a benchmark and they use not just the rfo benchmark but they have their own benchmark where you can actually compare your machine against a bim box but take it from me from using them consistently for a year now these things fly they can handle these especially these very large complex models in twin motion as well but also in revit extremely well so if you're looking for a new machine or a new laptop definitely reach out to bimbox head you can email them at sales at bimboxusa.com or head on over to bimbox.bimafterdark.com to learn more a couple other a couple other great things about bin boxes they all come with a three year warranty and they will come delivered to your door in 10 to 15 10 to 14 days after you order them anyone who's ordered any laptops or desktops recently knows that most manufacturers will not deliver a machine that fast especially a machine that is this fast in that fast of a time um the other thing just to mention um everyone's probably seen what's going on right now with with bitcoin and and cryptocurrency um going through the roof and because of that graphics cards are extremely difficult to to get a hold of anyone who's tried to build a pc right now may have realized that if you want a 3000 series gtx or nvidia graphics card you can't get one and i can tell you right now that bimbox does have some of the 3000 series in stock so if you want to build a desktop with those reach out to buck and his crew at bimbox so thank you for sponsoring this you guys are amazing we're coming up to almost a year which is crazy to think about and i want to thank bimbox for supporting this this show so thank you guys um okay here we go um isaiah just asked what are you pushing in the bimbox specs so i'm hoping to do a detailed review of the bimbox i'm going to review this one back here which is the desktop as well as maybe in a separate video um the the um uh the laptop um but for right now um i'm not going to just go cranking through the specs just know that they're maxed out you know 64 gigs of ram um i believe this this this one has a 2080 or 2070 super the 30s didn't exist at the time um i9 i think processor all overclocked all that good stuff all right so i'm just reading comments i remember this is live so feel free to read uh ask questions comments as you go along i'm going to try my best to keep up with going through content um awesome looks like there's a lot of people that are interested in this large site topic which is pretty cool i will tell you i saw there's a question about infraworks i will tell you that the purpose of what we're doing is mainly mainly for visualization to some degree of accuracy but so if you're an infraworks user and you're civil engineer and stuff this is going to be helpful but i will tell you that we're not developing our sites that level of detail we have other options for that we have done it and we do do it but like for today's example it's more of just managing these large files and and complex phasing and so on and so forth so um let's see let us jump into the content sorry i'm just reading some comments here um all right so what i want to do is i'm i was trying to figure out how to explain this uh or how to run through this and so i have a whole bunch of examples and so what i figure i'll do is i'll just quickly jump into um one of the first examples in the twin motion scene and then jump into revit and sort of talk about how the two interact and some lessons learned um i picked two specific projects for two specific reasons one of them is a very large site in sort of an agricultural site in eastern new york western connecticut and this one's nice because it's topography so we're using the topography tool and there's a lot of unique things to it um and then the other one is still a little bit rural but a little more a little more things going on to college campus and instead of using topography we actually use floors for all of our site stuff and so i thought it'd be kind of interesting to show the two on the modeling side but then also just talk about how the two kind of interact in in twin motion so without further ado let me let me jump into twin motion so this is twin motion 20 20.2 the latest builds and um full disclosure i've got two instances of twin motion running and two instances of revit running and anyone who's used twin motion and part part of what i want to talk about today is ways to keep your twin motion files more stable anyone who's used to in motion on large scale stuff knows that if you just go at the scene willy-nilly you can make a crashable scene it's just um you know if you're not paying attention and don't have good practices it will happen so um cross our fingers we're live uh two instances of twin motion two instances of revit regardless of your machine specs doesn't actually matter when it comes to that that this we could blow up but we'll see i have i have some ideas if we do blow up okay so here let me just click in here so here's the scene actually so hopefully you guys can see it pretty cool scene right so if i if i pan around you can see this there's a lot this is a big scene um if i move if i zoom in a little here you can see there's there's a lot going on in the scene we've got a bath house here um we've got uh there's some stone walls over there uh there's some cows there's our cows there's some horses there's some farmhouses there's a road here you know there's trees there's all kinds of really cool stuff right and this is sort of the little main part about this um of this uh agricultural campus which is kind of like a uh it's a barn but for learning type of environment it's pretty cool um but anyways you can see there's a whole bunch of things going so i'm gonna try and figure out how how i want to sort of explain this but obviously as you see things feel free to ask but you can see it's running pretty smooth it looks pretty nice um and uh and so what i'll also do is before i jump into revit to show you how to set up over here there's also a bunch of cabins sort of laid out if i spin around here there's a river right there spin around here and so there are there are some things happening in here so if i spin around just to show you kind of what's happening on this site if i click on building legend we have this this cool setup here which is more conceptual buildings with with these huge notes and and and these whose errors just talk about you know the different the different pieces of the site um if i say construction with notes and i zoom in a little bit um you can see there's some notes there uh the construction piece is actually turned off right now but that's okay let me do construction site too there we go so now you can see there's um there's a construction site happening on here which is which is pretty cool and then if i flip down here to construction site one you can see there's instruction site with names so there's just you know a lot of neat things happening in this site and if i zoom down you can also see those utilities in here wait till you see how how we created these utilities because again this is conceptual and much more much more for visual than anything else but i'm taking advantage of the x-ray tool in twin motion or the x-ray material type which is super super cool just to flip through some of it and then i think back here there's a there's a little animation of one of these cabins going in so let me just fly back over here to you guys i'm going to try and move as slow as possible knowing that there may be some bandwidth issues but you can see there's some of those utilities which is really neat and then there's also uh prefab cabins going in zoom up here like that pretty cool just showing an animation of these cabins going in okay so oh wait uh isaiah just said it crashed did it actually crash no don't don't scare me like that i don't think it crashed it looks fine on my end hopefully it didn't let me let me know if it crashed guys because don't don't scare me like that that's gonna scare me okay so that's kind of an idea of the scene there's some stuff going on there's there's two construction sites that are happening it's a large scene there's a lot going on in it um so what i want to do now is jump into rev and just talk about how the revit side was set up and then i could talk a little bit about how the how the um how the twin motion side was set up yes thank you bernardo and franco and uh isaiah i do not appreciate the joke because i can tell you right now that um you know running running two uh two twin motion instances uh and two revit instances and unfortunately the revit versions were different so i had to run them um uh is scaring the the crap out of me so to speak okay so let me jump into the revit scene now so check this out pretty cool to see them side by side so thank you chris for telling me it did not crash isaiah i don't appreciate it okay so uh so if i zoom around here you can see um there's some kind of cool stuff happening this is a large site as you can see and this is topography and the reason i wanted to show this one separate from the other one is that this is using topography right it's it's sloped uh it's a large sloping site on the side of a mountain and uh and there's topography going around and you can see we have these sort of conceptual existing buildings okay so the first thing i want to talk about quickly is the topography itself if any of you saw my previous episode where i talked about um site um i'll click it in here i think it was episode 25 actually wow i'll post it in here and i'll also post it in the links for anyone watching the replay um i i talk a little bit about some of the different site tools and and and and techniques that i have one of them is the auto clicker which some of you may be familiar with and so i believe and it's been a little while so i don't exactly know but i do believe that this one we only had an image of the topography so we did use the auto clicker to create it for those that don't know about the auto click i'm also posting that in the chat and i'll put i'll put it in the description below um so uh so the site itself was built like that um the the sub regions um you know most of the roads the water down here these are all sub-regions and then you'll also notice i have these sub-regions over here these represent trees big big swaths of trees so twin motion has a great feature where you can scatter based on material so i can quickly fill in this forest you know using that tool very fast the other thing the other thing that i can do is you'll notice if i zoom in there's these little placeholders okay so when it comes to placing objects on your site you may not need to or want to have every single object exist in your revit model so when it comes to trees that need to be in a very specific location or maybe buildings that or cars anything that needs to be in a very specific location you can actually use these placeholders to place them so you see this one is called placeholder cabin and so um or maybe those are trees i don't remember let's see those are those must been cabins so those are cabins out there or i can use these actual buildings as cabins what you'll notice is in this model right these cabins are just those conceptual versions but if i go i'm sorry that's the other one but if i go into that that twin motion scene you'll notice that these buildings most of them except for the existing if i zoom in they've got detail to them right these are actual building models and so depending on your project and how i mean look at this one here with the glass it looks so cool that looks so neat there's nothing cooler by the way if you guys haven't tried twin motion um the probably my favorite part about it is just having quality materials and lighting and then just orbiting around there's just something great about the feeling of the smoothness and the look of orbiting around a model with these beautiful reflections and stuff anyways so you'll notice there's a lot of detail in this cabin but if i go to my revit model it looks like this and so depending on your scene and depending on what you're trying to do it may not make sense to model or have all of your models in these in these in these locations for us personally i was building the site model while someone else was building all these buildings so we decided to do was say we'll just use these as placeholders and in twin motion you can just flip out um if you if you load it incorrectly and i do believe i have a tutorial on this too you can actually just flip out one object for another object so if you load in the cabin i can flip it out for one of these placeholder cabins so the cabins themselves for example if i go over to 3d you know here is one of those models with the base point being the same base point as the cabinets obviously you could link them in as well and we'll show you in the next project that you can you can have them linked in but this was kind of a nice work around for us because while someone was cranking through building all these little buildings i was able to build the site and then all i had to do was in twin motion all we had to do was flip them out okay um somebody just asked chris just asked is twin motion free for students i believe it is um if you head on over to the website you have to fill out some forms i don't know for sure um junior just said we have to watch uh the twin motion site live yep definitely definitely check that one out um okay awesome just making sure i catch up with your chat there's there's probably like a six to ten second delay so i'm trying to make sure i'm keeping up okay so that was kind of cool this was again these are different approaches and something's gonna work for you that may not work for other people but it worked for us for this for this example so then within each one of these um imports you know i um you know i could bring in the cabins as their own and control them but then i could also control the visibility of it so what what that allowed me to do too was on this building legends portion which i thought was pretty neat we're showing new buildings renovations and and existing right so red is to be demolished um pink is new and white is uh or pink is renovation i think and white is new or maybe white was renovation whatever um existing to remain there and so without having to use all those crazy um detailed models now from far away you have this beautiful sort of key plan that works through your job through your site and somebody i think asked about how we colored these um this is actually just a mass in revit and so it's kind of hard to see there but these are just masses that we drew in revit and we exported on their own one of the coolest things and so if i turn this on and off you can see there it is there i'm a little nervous to isolate it because sometimes that does some weird stuff right now but um you can see that so one of the really nice things about um using using twin motion with revit side by side without using let's say the link is that you can just create things and then isolate them and export them and bring them in as their own individual objects right um i'm sorry i'm just reading here let's see people are just talking about um people just talking about the twin motion pricing and and um and a few other things uh so uh um dave just mentioned that twin motion does have the unreal engine features which puts it in a different class yes and if you're if you're interested in unreal and the relationship the new the there is there is a beta out there for for the connection between twin motion unreal and it's getting the line is getting more blurred which is pretty sweet okay so um so what i was saying before is um you can isolate things so for example if i go to um inside site you'll see this right here this is just an isolated piece of dirt and and fencing so in order to reduce the the size of my twin motion file instead of bringing in an entire new site to show that construction happening all i have to do is bring in the dirt and the fencing and it can come in as its own as its own model so if i go back to construction site two actually i think that was construction site one yeah you'll see now instead of bringing in an entire site i have construction site two and construction site one i have them as their own imports so what's nice about that is if you refresh something you don't have to refresh everything which anyone who's dealt with twin motion knows that you can you know if you're using large sites like this the i could tell you uh one lesson learned is as much as possible if i zoom all the way out right you could see i mean look at all the trees right all the trees all this context all the stuff around it the stone walls the trees the the rocks all this stuff the even the animals right the cows and the and the um and the horses all that stuff those are probably not going to change all that much so if i'm making a lot of changes to this site as much as possible i'm going to make sure that i don't have to refresh that entire world right so so think about your models as in big site smaller sites and how you can manage it so that you're not refreshing everything so for example right that i showed you that construction site so if this fencing changes which anyone who's ever dealt with uh construction management and fencing and planning a site knows that uh there's nothing that changes more than fencing um you know the fact that we even put it on paper is amazing when you think about how much it changes but um i can refresh this and all it's doing is refreshing the dirt and the fence instead of the dirt the fence and every other aspect of the site and i promise you just by doing that alone and thinking with that mentality you're going to create a more stable twin motion scene some of the biggest crashes i've ever had were because i was trying to refresh a whole scene that also included all of these trees and people and plants and cars with them okay i'm just checking to see i see there's a bunch of joe bucheck asked if it's the appalachian trail actually it may be i should i'll double check that i actually don't know if it is but it may actually be trying to see it on a map there it may actually be close to it um dave also mentioned menu management so this this project isn't a great example of menu management so i'll show you in the next project um a good example of menu management i also noticed that you guys didn't see what i was clicking down here um so down here on the right what i've been clicking is scene states so this is what's great about this with twin motion is that you can save any scene state you want so you can turn anything off by material by object by individual piece whatever you want and then you can save that as a scene state which is a great way to control phasing um or even um um uh like notes and stuff so like this building logistics one or building legend one you can see that's a scene state um and so i turn on this this this uh this import here which is called site area callouts i turn that on and that's what that's what actually does the um the the views there all right so let me bring myself back here okay perfect so so this uh let me just pull out to construction with notes okay so a couple tips on this one um the first one is what i just mentioned there which is bringing in the entire site and then bringing in pieces of it that you know are going to change so maybe you're building site within the entire site even if it's not construction let's say it's architecture um even bringing in your building site separate um as an import from from your from your overall context site is probably a good idea the place that you know is going to change a lot you may want that to be its own import then you can refresh it without other stuff happening so that's a key there as far as just site modeling as i mentioned check out that that post um but uh everything from the fences here um to the stone walls if i go over here stone walls uh whoa sorry just went in the lily pads to the stone walls to the uh to the to even the utilities those are all using railings the fencing all all using railings and so check out that previous post but if i jump back into here you could see this this is railings and the reason uh i'm using railings there is because it follows topography right and so if i zoom in see this this railing right here this railing is actually following the topography and so is this railing here right so you're just drawing lines and you're letting it um and letting it uh follow topography same thing here see this guy i know it looks crazy in revit but this is just a wall um that is it's called stonewall too but it's actually just a railing so if i go to edit path check this out oops there it is see that it's just a line so i just drew a line like this right but then it's hosted to the surface of the of the topo so now it does that okay so then when i go when i bring it into twin motion with some some quality materials and because we're zoomed out pretty far um you can see i dumped some real rocks on top of it just to make it look blown up but uh if i zoom in here a little bit you can see that's all it is it's just a rock wall just like that this obviously doesn't look that great up close because um we're not going to be up close but from way back here it looks like a rubble wall which is which is pretty sweet all right i saw a couple questions in there before we jump in is my forest low poly nope my forest is 100 um twin motion trees so if i zoom all the way in you can see i will tell you that this scene was actually done in the beta of 2020 and i just opened it this morning in the new version so some of the trees didn't fully come through correctly but um those are actual 100 100 um twin motion trees so they are high poly um and then dave also asked are you remapping all materials yes yes so um uh for the sake of reality and and looking uh looking more realistic in in twin motion we usually just go with uh naming making sure our naming conventions make sense and then mapping all the materials into in motion one thing i will add with materials for those of you not familiar with twin motion is um there's a little setting on materials called grunge and it's one of those things where it can get overused a little bit if you use it in in specific scenes but for a big landscape like this grunge is your friend so if i click i'm going to t on my keyboard for materials and then i'm going to click my my grass and i'm going to go under more and i'm going to turn off all the grunge and show you the difference all right so see the grass now and even the pavement let me turn off on the pavement too okay let me go to more turn that down okay so now the scene right if you're looking at it it starts looking a little gross and you start seeing the repetitiveness of the of the material for the grass right but now if i click here and i turn on that grunge material see that i actually used around 80 for that and then i'm going to click it on the asphalt look at the asphalt there hopefully you can see it from here i'm going to crank that up now look at the difference it has this way of sort of breaking up textures and really making scenes feel and look more realistic so do not be afraid of using the grunge material that's another nice little tip from this scene how to make the text legends the text themselves is a is a note in twin motion so so these are called call out notes if i click this guy you can see this is just a note that you can push and pull around the the text legend for the building legend those are actually model text in revit for some reason i must have opened the wrong revit file it doesn't have these in it um but uh this is just those are those are text in revit that were brought in on their own so if i if i click here um uh area callouts you can see there's on and off uh oh that one might have done it hold on okay i'm gonna let twin motion come back a little bit so a couple questions in there uh did you add trees in revit first um no i didn't but you can if you wanted to so um so what i did there is i used the material as i showed uh in the beginning of the of the lesson um and actually let me i could jump back in well well twin motion is blowing up in the background oops sorry i just hit subscribe on you guys okay uh while twin motion is blowing up in the background i'll quickly show you so for trees as i mentioned um i have a big material and these areas here these are called forests and so i'm you can actually scatter trees on those materials if you want very specific locations of trees you can use objects and you can replace them and for that i'll actually quickly post um a link to um to my replace objects tutorial to show you exactly how to do that here we go i'm just posting that in the chat right now all right so that's how you would replace objects like trees and cars which i'll show you in the next example i should probably just jump into the uh and the um thing so dave vaughn just said trees will crash twin motion yes and so this is why it's important this is why i was stressing the idea of of your context and trying to figure out what exactly you need to refresh so when you have a site with multi-phase or maybe it's a site where you want to show five options in the same scene you really want to figure out what actually needs to refresh because i've seen the most issues when if you have that big forest of trees like i had and then you refresh that entire forest that's when you can start running into issues because if you think about it there may be 60 000 trees that are hosted to that surface and that surface is getting refreshed so they're either going to disappear or weird stuff is going to happen um and so so that's why when you think about it you know trying to figure out how to how do you how you place the trees and then never have to touch them again especially when it comes to the big context ones is huge it's a huge um a huge example so dave just mentioned using the proxy yes so i just i just posted an example to the to the proxy objects there so what i'm going to do is i think oh there we go okay i think i think hopefully you guys can still see me let me know if you can still see me but uh oh man twin motion just went nuts you guys you guys missed it it was great okay so i'm gonna jump over to the other scene real quick and and then we can talk about some of the placeholder objects and how that worked um and so let me just jump into this the other the other twin motion instance is open i don't know if it's frozen or not i'm going to go back to it but this one's working right now so we're just going to roll with it okay so this is the other scene which is pretty cool you can see it's a pretty it's a pretty large scale if i zoom out a little bit it's actually a college campus so let me zoom out some more and so you can see there's a uh some existing buildings hockey some some soccer fields and then an existing parking lot here okay so a perfect example of proxy objects are these cars right here placing these cars especially if this was an angle or like a radius or something is a nightmare and there's no reason there's no reason to to manually place these if you don't have to so what we use in these scenes is we actually use proxy objects so if i go to my the revit model now of this exact scene hopefully cross our fingers i'm asking a lot of revit now okay so if i go to site complete how are you handling striping great question dave i also have a tutorial for that so those are railings too believe it or not okay so i'm going to show you that right now in revit and i'll also post a tutorial to that um to that uh or the link to that tutorial as well um striping here we go there it's pretty funny i have a tutorial for that and that and that and that i just posted a link in the chat i'll also post it in the description for those of you that are watching it live but um okay let me just jump into this perfect okay so let me turn off uh let me find find the image that i want to go to um existing inside okay here we go so remember how i mentioned um you know bringing out the inside of the site the part that's gonna change separate from the rest of it so check this out if i go to this scene you'll notice here this is a nice comprehensive scene but if i go if i take you through the actual phasing of this job so i'm going to quickly do that here's trailer and temp walls over here or trailer and temp power here's here's a fencing so we're starting to add some fencing right then we go down to excavation and now you can see there's excavation so this gives you an idea of the extent of the site now okay if i zoom in a little more you can start to see it right so you'll notice the rest of the site has not changed so in order to make the scene more stable and manageable you can see this is kind of what i was exporting separate from the rest so the exterior everything around it came in as one model and then this piece on the inside came as another model so then i can do dirt i can do excavation i can do parking i can do the final build all those things i can change refresh update without affecting all of my context around it so that's extremely important as far as striping you can see if i zoom in here these stripes are actually railings and you can check out that tutorial i just posted there including right here you can see this this is all all just railings these are floors we kept everything flat so the reality is we didn't need to use railings but the railings make it easier than extrusions or more floors right so um so once you once you start getting used to the striping idea it's actually not that bad i will not take full credit for this um a colleague of mine derek did all of this modeling for this project minus some miscellaneous crap um so i'll i'll i'll let him tell you if it was a pain in the ass striping this one but uh i could tell you using the using the railing tool definitely makes it a lot easier and a lot more digestible so there's existing uh inside the site but now let's talk really quickly about the building itself because i do want to touch on that before we before we end so what you'll notice is that this building this is a hockey rink actually so this building and i think this is one of the older designs so if the architect's out there i'm sorry i'm still this is still the older scene i didn't want to open the new one um but uh so as you can see the excavation is there there's a foundation right and use this idea even for like architecture if you're just showing different options instead of bringing in entire entire pieces of the building to show it being built for example or maybe if you're going to show like a facade let's say instead of bringing in the entire building once and then bringing in the entire building again with a different facade only bring in what you need to change so that you don't have to bring in two instances of that giant complex building so this for example you could see here's the here's the excavation right if i hit structure right there's the structure now you can see these have trusses these have bracing there's a lot going on in this right and so this this kind of stuff with all these polygons this will start deteriorating your scenes because these are real-time rendered scenes right it's it's polygon it's meshes it's all that good stuff so you want to minimize as much as possible so when i go to structure 2 right most people's natural instinct is to set up this view of the building in revit showing the entire structure with with some of the walls with some of the uh pieces uh you know pieces of roof on it and export that entire thing right as a new instance in twin motion what i'll show you here is if i go into revit imports i actually have these brought in as their own individual pieces so steel two see that steel one and then foundations so i'm actually just turning on the sequences of those so now i'm not doubling tripling or quadrupling the models in my scene and so in revit the way i'm doing that and again this is for construction phasing but the reality is if you think about the the facade for example there's no reason to bring in the entire building to show three different facade designs only bring in the pieces that need to change and bring everything else uh once right so if i go through this if i go to foundation you can see there's my foundation plan if i go to structure one i just have a section box that's cut at the perfect location and then structure two it starts at the exact same location oops i don't know why that went to all right starts at the exact same location and it fills the rest in so and then facade uh start you could see then i just bring in pieces of the facade this is actually a newer model so i apologize for that um and then facade finish i'm only bringing in some of the rest of the facade right so bringing one happening in the next half so that's huge right when you when you uh and it doesn't matter what machine you have like this is just the nature of the software itself you want to reduce the number of pies as much as possible so if i had this structure in here 17 times you're just 17 times in the resources needed for it for absolutely no reason so that's probably one of the biggest things i will tell you for for keeping scenes small is not duplicating uh polys for absolutely no reason okay um so uh let me just finish this uh this this uh phasing for you guys you can see it because it's kind of cool um if i go to structure two if i go to final python not work so now the building's be actually this is the new version of the building so uh if if jcj if you guys are out there i got the new building in here um so now you can see uh we're doing some things like showing the final parking here's the striping that you can see there but you'll notice that it's all happening inside that one that that individual area right so none of these trees had to get redone every time i refresh this and i could tell you this thing changed a lot already it wasn't refreshing anything around the context okay okay so now and then i can go to complete just you can see the complete scene so with the complete you can see there's a lot of parking and cars and stuff here so these i also used placeholders so if i if i zoom in really quickly to revit and if i can remember um if i can remember where the heck i had these things saved let me go back out and while it's happening chris just asked what arena this is um i'm not going to say uh um if the name of it but it's a hot it's a it's a new hockey arena that's being built on a campus here in in connecticut i'm sure if you read close enough you'll find it um junior just asked um oh uh christopher just asked is the construction equipment part of twin motion revit or something else good point so i'll jump into twin motion in a second and show you um it's a mix a bag between twin motion and and numbers of other areas um but uh real quickly before i get off of it i do want to talk about the the site the site walls here so let me just flip this and i know i said i would talk about phasing and so um this is not going to be a a it's already 812 so sorry whatever um so this wasn't meant to be a detailed look into phasing i do plan on doing more detail look into the actual phasing part of revit but what i did want to talk about is how we manage phases in these different types of seeds and so what you'll notice there is i just flip from construction to to new construction so in this particular model we actually have existing construction and new construction but then what we and that's only because i needed to make the intermediate phase for some specific reasons a lot of times honestly what we will do is we will have we will use design options to manage our phases um because of the fact that we're using large site things it doesn't really make a big difference they're overlapping each other the biggest issue with design options for that is usually hosting to site objects but you can see here for example my construction fencing is a design option um i know you can't see that so let me just move my head um so over here i have three different fence locations so if i say fence position one um you could see of course it's in different it's under construction so we'll we'll back out of that for a second but what i did want to show you is all the placeholder cars i moved these by accident up when i was doing something but you can see i have these objects here that are proxy objects and so now i can quickly fill in this scene with placeholder cars and then bring those into twin motion and flip them out using that tutorial that i just posted for all those cars there instead of click click click click click click click and randomizing and doing all this cool stuff but but you know that's a really quick easy way to jump into it so before i move on i do want to answer your question um who was that asked was it junior um no it wasn't junior sorry oh christopher christopher asked about construction equipment okay let me jump into excavation okay so this is actually a mixed bag of twin motion which has some great construction equipment so i'll zoom in close to these even though these scenes aren't meant to be zoomed into remember i mean i mean you can but so like this for example um this dump truck here um there's some excavators there's a bunch of really nice um quinn motion equipment but there's things that aren't in twin motion and so like this for example the concrete pump truck is not and so this excavator this demolition excavator is not um these are um and this lull is not for example so the way we pull those in is we actually have our own library that we've created over time using various sources turbosquid buying libraries and you know whether the 3dmax or something like that dare i say on this channel but um this sketchup warehouse whatever is left of it we pulled some models off of there in the past and we bring them in some revit families some 3d max and blender wherever the nice thing about doing motion is that you can bring them all into one location so you can use proxy objects or you can just place them manually i will give you a tip when bringing in from other programs if you are if you are bringing in um an fbx from turbosquid then you're good to go you're bringing an fbx directly in there sometimes they're pretty high poly so be careful with that the one thing that we do do for for bringing in sketchup models is you'll notice if i click this it's actually a an individual mesh and not a thousand different things and then if i go over here to my user library i have under machinery i have all of these pieces of machinery that are ready to go and so the way we do that is we don't bring in skp files for anyone who's used twin motion you know that it has the ability to bring them in we export them as fbxs we bring them in as collapsed objects so they come in as one mesh we add materials and then we add them to our library then we delete that import from our scene this is another stability thing okay if you bring in a a sketchup file or 3d max file into your scene every time you need to place a pump truck for example you're loading instances of a referenced object and then you're multiplying it multiple times across the scene that is disaster waiting to happen okay so what we're doing here is we're actually creating a library from these objects that are individual meshes there's not a thousand things and they're not looking for referenced objects and that's key okay so what you'll notice is if i go to my imports on on on twin motion all these imports here the only thing that's imported into this project is my revit export backgrounds things that are going to change right those are the only imports not a single piece of equipment is an import it's part of my library okay so huge thing if you guys and this this again this is just for construction equipment but if you're if you're a resident residential architect and or maybe healthcare and you're bringing in a lot of healthcare objects from turbosquid or something like that that's a good tip is to create them bring them in even if you do them in their own scene apply materials save the mesh to your library and then delete the export or the import and only use it from your library i promise you you will get more stable and smaller scenes too is another thing awesome let's see uh sabasio sabusio sorry what to do if 2018 revit fails to upgrade when importing not sure what you're saying there um this actually uh one of the the last scene i showed you was in revit 2018 i think you're talking about if if revit 2018 fails to upgrade to another version maybe um i'm not really sure what you're asking there but if your revit fails to upgrade to another version then just keep it in the other version if you have it and try to use it but uh you've got some bigger issues than than then then importing it to into twin motion okay let's see um john gray just asked is there a mapping interface for revit materials to tm yes there is to some extent i guess it depends on what you mean by a mapping interface i will tell you from experience that um i usually just end up redoing the materials so if you know that from the start and you're never going to use the revit rendering engine for example then it's probably okay for you to to to not even apply textures in revit and just use material names with colors and shaded views and then do all the texturing in twin motion uh which is tip i also see that um my my video feed is starting to freak out so i wonder if uh what if i should try to close any of these in the background here okay what are my light settings all right cool that's that's a good that's a good question and i will i'll jump into that um and newton newton just said 120 people watching and only 27 likes yeah guys like it come on youtube loves likes in the algorithm um uh before i jump into the light settings um asked if i recommend live link personally i don't use the live links lumion or twin motion for me personally i i like exporting and memorializing that moment in time building my scenes and then refreshing if i need it um mainly because i'm not using these as let's say a real-time design tool for so to speak they're more like production at the end and i am still kind of using enscape as that real-time design tool um which kind of has that real-time connection i just personally um i like the ability of saying check it here pull it out do your scene and then if you need updates you go back and you do it keeping both open and refreshing and stuff as i mentioned with the whole refresh thing it can make it pretty challenging so depending on what you're doing depending on what you're doing maybe it makes sense for you personally for me the live link for either programs has never ever really made sense okay so what i'm gonna do is um for the for the um uh oh obs didn't like that man these two versions of twin motion is freaking my computer out i love it um i was really concerned about doing that i actually tried closing the other version but it's it's the other the other scene is is like stuck the other another good tip for twin motion by the way is when something seems like it's stuck just wait it's one of those programs where like it'll bog down for a second but if you just give it a few minutes it magically comes back don't immediately control delete and freak out just give it a minute and it actually usually comes back which is pretty sweet um okay so real quick the light settings this is probably this this scene right here is probably one of my favorite light settings and so um i'll run through them quickly but what i'll also do is i'll i'll take snips of it and i'll put them in the blog post tomorrow so you don't have to furiously write down but i'll run through them really quickly another thing to mention before i jump into lights um let me just let me go to the complete setting that's probably the best one where you see lights this is probably one of my favorite for aerial views this this light setting for this scene just looks the most realistic to me it looks phenomenal but i will also add that the trees you use is really are really important i live in connecticut this project is in connecticut so it's new england so we do have a very specific type of tree trees around here i know if you live somewhere else maybe this doesn't make sense but i will tell you that some look way better in aerial views than others and so just quickly before i jump into lights i will talk about the trees there's only three trees being used in this entire scene in most of my scenes and one is the western red cedar so you see i just clicked it here and then the other one the other two are the european beach and the laurel so laurel european beach and um what was it the western red cedar western red cedar those are the only three trees i'm using this entire scene and i promise you it doesn't seem like that makes a difference but when it comes to the hues the saturation the colors and the leaves of the trees that can make a scene look really really goofy so just a little tip there maybe it doesn't work for you but only choose a certain number of trees don't go bizarre with with with trees don't go nuts with the trees okay so light settings oh doing motions freezing hold on i'll check out some chat while it's coming back remember i said wait for it to come back it's going to come back i promise um we actually had a zoom call where we were presenting a scene like this and uh it uh it did that too where it was like it was loading something really fast and it took a second and so i just jumped off and jumped you know stopped screen sharing and talked for a little bit and then come back and came back when it came back so that's what i'm doing to you guys and look at that it came back see oh man okay um real quick i do see a oh and that's dave just made a good point i clicked the tree groups which is probably what did a huge spike i will tell you for two in motion what i've noticed and i don't know if this is true maybe the developers can answer to this but um something like that makes a massive ram spike um which then flattens out and that's what freezes things there's like a huge ramp spike i don't know either way um so light settings light settings real quickly um if i go into my settings here okay so go to location real quick um you can see time of day i have at 10 45 in the morning i'm actually i didn't even put this in the right location this is in paris which is kind of funny but uh 10 45 in the morning i have it set for april and um i'll move my face out of the way so you guys can see it all um and it's the north offset is 301 that's not nearly as important but the april and time of day is helpful um that that'll have an effect on the scene as well so that's your localization settings the weather i almost always always have just a hint of of clouds on so for aerial scenes it doesn't seem to make a difference if i look up you can see the clouds um if you know as you can see here there's no clouds if you move it over just a little bit you get a hint of clouds it doesn't seem to make a difference but um you know but what it'll do is it'll start adding a little variation on the ground because of the shadows from the clouds so definitely recommend you do that if i go under effects on the right here don't really mess with these too much sometimes if depending on the scene i might crank up the smog you can see this is at 26 which is not too much lighting exposure negative 0.5 okay if i go into more i'm not i'm keeping auto exposure if you start messing with um night scenes and different dramatic lighting you may want to turn off auto exposure i'm leaving it on so i have my exposure at negative 0.5 my white balance is 8 400 k i have global illumination on my shadow settings depends on your scene play with the distance you need for your shadows so that shouldn't affect the look and then i think these are all mostly um existing but my lighting is sun intensity is all the way up sun reflection is 0.92 stars is point is 1 moon intensity is 1.5 and then ambient is 0.98 remember i'm going to snip all these and put them in the blog post tomorrow but i did want to run through them because you did ask um and then if i go under um i'm sorry back out here and if i go under camera you can see i'm using a 60 millimeter lens um you know depending on what it is that you're um you're doing uh that may make sense may not i have 50 vignetting which isn't a ton but it adds a little something to the ends um and then notice i obviously don't have depth of field of parallelism on visual effects here's where some of the stuff happens under color gradient this is huge i have just 65 contrast and 32 saturation i've mentioned this in numerous um in numerous other live streams um the real in general to me scenes look more realistic when you have higher contrast lower saturation just sort of a rule of thumb and so um this is all personal preference but if you like the looks of it i'm going to run through it so 65 contrast 32 saturation i have no visual filters on here so the type is none then if i go under filters i do have line light on this doesn't make a huge difference in aerials but what it does do is it gives you little edges when you need them so definitely something to turn on as you get closer to objects you can notice it more but it will it will add edges during exports and stuff so totally worth it um reflections uh ssr is on and that's really it i don't think there's anything else to talk about in settings let me see yeah so not not a huge hugely dramatic setup but also materials and trees make a difference you know that grunge on the ground that i mentioned before um the trees the tree types themselves all that stuff makes a huge difference to how realistic these scenes look okay ryan just asked what your camera settings are i think i answered that yeah um salutes from uh argentina and brazil what's up guys um um aka gats you got here late you'll be able to see the the replay don't you worry all right so uh i'm just checking to make sure there's no questions here um dave just said shadows are are mapped yeah so so the dis the shadow distance the what happens with the shadow distance is that um you know you want to set the distance so that you see all the shadows in your scene so that may change depending on where your scene is but um you'll play with that when you when you jump into twin motion you guys will see that all right i think i might have to end up here my uh my throat's getting a little dry i've been uh on zoom calls all day and i did a couple lessons last night so i'm i'm beat you guys had amazing questions this was awesome um make sure you subscribe subscribe to the channel here on youtube hit that notification bell give me a like thumbs up all that cool stuff comment what i'm going to do is all the links i mentioned today will be in the description here on youtube but i'll also post this on the blog at the revitkid.com or bimafterdark.com either one will get you there tomorrow so take a look out for that um and uh yeah amazing you guys are awesome i hope this was helpful i know this is a lot a lot of content if there's something a part a part of this that you want to dig into more feel free to reach out to me and let me know and i'll do an episode on it um the other thing i didn't mention um is if you are interested or you know someone who wouldn't be interested in being a guest head on over to submit.bimafterdark.com and you can submit and i'll see it and maybe you'll have a great idea that we can all share with the world so yeah more whiskey yes dave more uh more port wine port wine is definitely not helping with uh with a dry voice but awesome guys you guys are amazing thank you so much i'm amazed twin motion did not crash on me with two instances two versions of revit um i'll see you guys next week feel free to reach out hit me up on twitter at the revit kid you're amazing stay safe um and uh and i'll see you guys next week so with that i want to bid you a do i'll see you guys [Music] soon you

Channel: TheRevitKid

Views: 7,054

Keywords: revit, revit design, architecture, architecture design, autodesk revit, revit tutorial, lumion, lumion 3D, lumion architecture, architect, residential architect, revit tip, revit tutorials, revit architecture, BIM, building information modeling, autodesk revit tutorials, architecture tutorials, revit 2022, revit 2021, revit 2020

Id: jfcsHki7OEc

Length: 59min 10sec (3550 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 18 2021