Rendering a SketchUp Model in Twinmotion - COMPLETE BEGINNER TUTORIAL

what's up guys Justin here with the sketchup' essentials comm back with another sketch up into emotion tutorial for you so if you remember last week we talked about a program called twin motion which is a real-time rendering program that allows you to create great renderings from your Sketchup models so one of the things that's unique about this is through November you can download twin motion for free and you get to keep that version forever so the first thing I want you to do is I want you to go down to the link in the notes and download twin motion like I said if you download it and install it you get to keep this version as far as I'm aware there's not any strings attached to this other than after November if there are any updates obviously you'd have to pay to get the updated versions but this version is yours to keep so this series is kind of a getting started series it's a partnership with Epic Games to get the word out while twin motion is free and I think it's a great place for you to start if you haven't done anything with rendering so I will link to that intro video and the notes down below so go download it and then come back and we'll get into our rendering tutorial and so what I wanted to do is I wanted to give you an introduction video that showed you kind of a start to finish workflow for taking a model out of Sketchup and bringing it into twin motion and creating a rendering from it so this is going to kind of touch on a lot of the areas that you'll use when creating a rendering but it's going to be something that'll get you up and running and get you started and then we'll kind of build on that in future videos and so the first thing we need to do is we need to figure out what model we're going to use so I have downloaded a model from the 3d warehouse so this model is the modern bungalow from Alex C so if you want to download this model and follow along you can or you can go into the 3d warehouse and find any model that you'd like and so the first thing that I do when I download a model like this is I do a little bit of prep work and so one of the things you have to understand when you're dealing with a program like twin motion is it has its own library of things that you can bring in specifically for things like context models and landscaping and trees and things like which is great because it's really hard to find good tree models and things like that in the 3d warehouse so what you can do is you can take all of those you can put them on their own layer so in this situation for example I've taken all of the trees and you can see how these trees are in here in Sketchup geometry and I actually like these as Sketchup geometry but they're not gonna look very good inside of twin motion so we're gonna replace them in twin motion so what I've done is I've put them on their own layer and I've done the same thing with the shrubs over by the opening over here and I've also turned off the car models so I've taken those cars and I've put them on their own layer as well because we can replace those with twin motion cars which are going to be usually better models so once you have those things turned off the other thing you may want to do is if you want to be able to access things quickly like for example I've created a group that has my grass in it so you can see how right here I've taken my grass geometry and I've grouped it and that's so I can access that quickly later so that I can apply grass to it but anything you need to do to prep your model to bring it into twin motion go ahead and do that now and then once you've done that go ahead and save your model and what we're gonna do is we're gonna take this over into twin motion and there's two different ways to do that the first way to do that is to just import it directly or import it manually so the way that you would do that is you would open up twin motion and right here there's a button for import so that'll allow you to import a Sketchup model if you decide that you want to do that so what I'm doing instead is I'm using the twin motion link extension so this is an extension you can download and install in Sketchup and when you first open up twin motion so when you first open up to one motion and you see this welcome page if you click on this button for enhance twin motion with add-ins what that's gonna do is that's gonna pop up a window where you can download the direct link for Sketchup extension right here and then install that so that's what I'm going to use so make sure that you have that enabled inside of Sketchup and then we're gonna use that to take our model move it over into twin motion and so make sure that you save your model then the other thing we're going to do is we're gonna go into our settings real quick and we're gonna go ahead and make sure the option for collapse is set to none rather than by material if you bring this in by material what that's gonna do is that's gonna group all of your objects in your scene your graph off to the right-hand side by material which isn't really what we want cuz we want to be able to access some of those individually if we need to so you can also double check the fix UV texture options and the optimized model and this exclude objects smaller than 0.1 meter that is set by default I recommend going ahead and leaving that checked I believe that has to do with the UV mapping of the materials but I'm not a hundred percent sure on that one but in any case you want your collapse set to none optimized model fix UV texture exclude object smaller than point one meter I'm gonna go ahead and save those as default and then we're ready to bring this into twin motion and so in order to do that we're just gonna click on the button right here for C in twin motion and so what that's gonna do is that's gonna pop up this little window right here that allows you to set if you want to bring this into an existing project or a new project then this situation i want to create a new project and i'm gonna click okay and so when you do this this is gonna synchronize with your Sketchup model and it's gonna bring that data over and it's gonna bring your model into twin motion so you can see how now what I have is I have my model sitting in here with the default background and the default ground in here as well and so you can see how this gets brought in with all of your different grouping and your other different objects in here that we're inside of your outliner you can see how this this organization was all maintained because we selected the option for a collapse by none so that means I can find things like my grass group and I can isolate them a little bit later if we need them and so usually when I bring a new model into twin motion I usually follow kind of a four step process so the first thing I do well the very first thing I do is I look at this and I make sure that it's showing what I want and see if there's any changes that I need to make into my model because one of the things that gets a little bit weird is if you start making changes to your materials and then you go back and you click the relink button it'll update the changes that you make inside of Sketchup but what it'll do in addition to that is it'll also wipe out some of those new material choices so usually I make sure that I've made the changes inside of Sketchup that I need before I start doing any of this so usually I follow the process of starting by replacing materials so I like to replace a lot of the Sketchup materials with twin motion materials and then I like to add my landscaping so my trees and my grass and things like that and then my context models and then I create a rendering so I guess it's kind of a four step process but you can see I can fly around this model using the W a s and D keys well the first thing I want to do is I want to start replacing some of these materials and I like to do that first because if I do my landscaping first that adds a lot of polygons and things that the program has to render and it can kind of slow everything down so I like to wait on those until after I've done my materials but the way that we're gonna do this is really simple you're just gonna go into your library on the left hand side of your page and if you don't see it just click on this little arrow and you can just click on this folder for a min cereals you can see there's a number of different materials in here that we can use inside of our twin motion rendering and so all we need to do in order to do this is let's start by replacing the stone on this wall so all you have to do is go find a material that you like so in this case if I scroll down there's some stone wall options all you have to do is just click and drag this on here and you can see how it's going to replace that material so by doing this I can bring this material in and I can replace the Sketchup material with the twin motion material and notice that all of these are editable like for example I don't really like the way these blocks look or the stones look so I'm just gonna click and drag on this scale option in order to make those stones bigger so you can see how this is made looks like it is made of larger materials you can also click on the more' button if you want and you can adjust how that sits on the wall by moving the X and the y so you can see I can move this up and down depending on how I want this to look so I can kind of align that joint with the top of this wall so what we're gonna do is we're just going to go through and we're just going to replace all of the different materials with twin motion materials so another example is this water right here right now the water doesn't look very good because it's just a texture well if you go into the water settings you can find different water materials in here and drag them in there to replace that so like for example I'm going to use this pool 0 2 I'm just going to click and drag this on top of that water and you can see how that's replace this water with an animated water material that looks a lot better than the Sketchup material you can see how that continued back through here so we're just gonna do that for the rest of our materials so I'm probably gonna speed this up but all I'm doing is I'm just replacing materials I'm sizing them to make sure that they look good and we go from there [Music] all right so we're gonna go ahead and call this good for this exercise so you can see how I was able to easily replace all of this material with this metal panel material I was able to replace the glass of the reflective material and then swap out some of the stone tiles and things like that and if you were creating something with a little more detail like if we were doing like a fly around like this you might come back and replace these materials as well for this video I'm really only planning on creating kind of a front view we're only gonna worry about the finishes on the front side of the building for right now and again you can come in here and you can make changes so like for example I don't really like where this joint is so I'm just gonna change the move X just a bit until that joint isn't right there anymore so you can see how you can use this material picker tool to come in here and select different materials if you need to edit them for whatever reason but now what we're gonna do is we're gonna start adding our landscape materials in here so our landscape materials are gonna be things like trees but also grass so I'm gonna focus on the grass first so that one's a little bit tricky inside of twin motion because what you do is you use kind of a paintbrush in order to apply that grass material so we're gonna go out of this for a second and we're gonna come down here into the bottom section of our page we're gonna click on the little leaf that's going to get us into our nature settings and so our nature settings allow us to adjust things like our weather like where our clouds are um the actual physical location of our project they also allows us to add vegetation so you can see if I click on the button for vegetation that's gonna pop up this little window in here and you can see how you've got different options for different things that you can then paint into your uh you can paint this into your rendering so what this tool does this allows you to click on the model paint button and select something like for example this long grass and you can see how that actually paints that grass material on to this face so it's actually adding this in here as 3d geometry so you can see how if I move down this is actually like moving around in the way so it's very realistic but you do have to be a little bit careful in the way that you apply it so for example like right now if I was to click right here you can see how what this does is this comes in here and this adds grass to anything inside of this little paint sphere we'll talk more about this in a future video you can see how what that did is that brought grass in and it put it on our road which is not what we want so I'm gonna go ahead and I'm going to undo that and I'm gonna undo the first one so the best way to apply grass inside of twin motion that I have found up to this point is to take your grass areas and you actually want to use the Cena graph to isolate them so that's why I grouped my grass inside my Sketchup model now I can find my group for grass and you can actually right click on that inside of your Cena graph and remember you will have to create this group inside of Sketchup but you can right-click on this and there's an option in here for isolate or exit selection so what this does is this will actually isolate the same thing that you have selected inside of your Cena graph so you can only see that well now I can come in here and I can look at my different grass options so if you go into your library vegetation and landscape you click on grass and flowers you can see there's a number of different grass options in here depending on what you want to do what I want to do for this one is I want to give it probably will give it the long grass option for right now and then once I give it the long grass option I don't want to click on this but rather I want to click and drag it to this option where it says drop here what that's gonna do is that's gonna allow you to select that down here and then you can use the paintbrush tool and you can just click and hold in order to paint this grass on this face so you can see how I'm able to add this in here really easily and there's some gaps but we're not gonna worry about the gaps quite yet for right now all I'm worried about is just painting the grass onto my grass faces it looks like I might have gotten it on some pavement back there we're gonna go ahead and be ok with that for this tutorial you do need to be a little bit more careful sometimes but one of the things that you can do is you can just select your diameter of this sphere you can make that a little bit smaller so let's say we want this to be five feet you can actually come in and paint a little bit more into some of these areas with gaps and then we'll fix the rest of this in a minute but what we've done is we've come in here and we've basically painted this grass material onto this face well the problem is our edges don't look very good right like this grass is kind of sticking along this edge whoops and we don't necessarily want that so what we're gonna do is we're going to use one of the border grass options so I can just click and drag this over here you can see how the border grass is a different kind of grass well I can come in here and I can paint the border grass along this face and be careful that you don't get it on the vertical face but you can see how this border grass is a lot smoother along this edge so I'm just painting my edges using the border grass and so once we have our grass painted we can just go back in here and right-click on this again you can wreak lick the button for isolate or exit isolate in order to de isolate that so now we have grass in here well now what I want to do is I want to add some trees so I'm gonna add trees out of the library and these are really easy to add just by going into your vegetation looking under trees and you can just click and drag these in so it's very simple and then once you have them in you can hold the shift key and drag and you can see how that's gonna allow me to create a copy so I don't have to go find this over and over again I can just hold the shift key and drag and we're just going to click OK and we're gonna do that three more times and you need to be careful that they're not so big that they go through your building then I'm also going to place I don't know if that's what I want maybe I want a taller tree one thing you can see about these trees is there's a little person next to them well the person next to them indicates how big the tree is so like for example these acacia are smaller and you can see how the person looks bigger but then like these American beech trees or the American elm trees are a lot bigger and you can kind of see that scale by looking at the person figure that's right in there so maybe I'll drop an elm right here and then maybe I'll place another one of these black gum trees right and I'm actually going to replace these with a smaller tree so what we have now is we have our landscaping setup so we've got our trees and our grass in here now I want to add some context and so context in this situation is gonna be things like cars on the road or people walking I'm just gonna use the built in model library in order to do that so there's two different ways you can do this the first is you can bring these cars in manually so you can just go find them in your model and you can place them or if you want this to be a little bit more random and we're gonna do this with our people if you want something a little bit more random what you can do is you can use what's known as a path so you can go into your urban settings and you can click on the button for paths and you can do a character path what that's gonna do is that's gonna allow me to add a path of people walking along this sidewalk just like this so I've just clicked on this hole button here I've single clicked in replaces path and when I'm done placing it you can just tap the right arrow key what this is gonna do is this is going to animate people walking along this path so you can see how this allows you to more randomly place those people in here just by setting that path then you can adjust things like the density and number of people if you want so you can drag that up or down you can also adjust the kind of clothing they have so if you want them to all be more like business looking people you can click on office or really whatever you want so in this situation you can either do this or you can just place people in here manually if that's what you want instead and so now we've got our house in here we've got our material set up we have our landscape in our context models well now it's time to export or rendering and I'm gonna go ahead and replace this car real quick with something that I think looks a little bit better it's the first thing we should do is we should go ahead and we should save this so go up to file and do a save to save your you're rendering that way if anything goes wrong or anything like that your changes have been saved and so once you've saved this we're ready to start setting up our rendered image so you're gonna set up your rendered image by going down to your menu at the bottom of the page and you're gonna click on this button right here from media and so media is where we're gonna set up our images and then export is where we're gonna export them that's the option below that so in order to do this we're just gonna click on this button for image and then we're just gonna click the plus button in order to create and save an image you can see how now we're inside what's known as media mode so media mode means that you're in here editing an actual image inside of your model rather than your overall model itself so all of these settings like the time of day which you can adjust using a slider all of these settings are going to be set in here based on your image settings not on your overall model settings so if you ever get in here and it won't let you make some changes or something like that you can just click on the button for quick media mode to get out of this but this is our scene and then now what we want to do is we're going to click on the more' button in order to make our different changes so you can see how for example what this allows us to do is this allows us to edit things like our camera settings it's like our field of view so how wide we want our field of view to be so in this situation I'm gonna set this as kind of a low view and with a lower field of view rather than a wider one and perspective correction is gonna change your perspective in here so if you want to set this so the perspectives a little bit more like so you can use that if you don't like the way the perspective looks I'm okay with that I actually like the way that it looks so I'm ready to go onto my next step so you can also set the output size of your image by clicking on this button right here if you click on more you can manually set that as well so now I'm gonna go back to my image and we can adjust other things in here I don't really want to do much with localization that allows you to adjust the time of year so you can see how that actually adjusts your time of year you can also use it to adjust your North offset so what direction North actually is inside of your image so you can also set like an actual location if you want to do that then your weather settings is gonna allow you to set if you have clouds in the background if it's raining you can use the options down below to set if it's snowing or not so you can set this like it's in the middle of a snowstorm if you want to do that so a lot of different options in here I like to add just a little bit of clouds in here I'm hoping at some point the ability to actually adjust where those clouds are in the sky gets added for right now I like to add a little bit of cloudiness right here cuz I feel like just a blue sky like this doesn't look very realistic so I'm gonna go ahead I'm going to add the cloudiness in here you can adjust your ambient and sunlight as well so you can adjust the brightness of the light that's cast off the Sun and then also you can adjust the ambient lighting which is just the general light that's available in the scene so just kind of play around with these there's no right or wrong answer it's more a question of getting the results that you want and so finally once this is all set you've got all your settings saved the way you want them you can go back and you can click on the button for refresh in order to change any setting or any changes that you made so you can save those to your image and we could call this something else as well so maybe we would call this something like front view and then once you've got this set up just go over into your export settings and just click on the button for image in order to select the view that you want to export so in this case I just want my front view you can see how you can select if you have multiple views in there they'll all show up in this list and then once you do that you can just click on the button for start export that's gonna allow you to set where you export your image to then you can just click the button for select folder and it's gonna export an image to that folder so if I open that up you can see how I've got this nice rendered view of the front side of this house with the context models in it the people walking through here there are some things we're gonna have to clean up like I've got grass coming through this wall maybe I want to add something to this face to make it a little bit more interesting but overall this is a really good render for having just brought this in from Sketchup without actually making any significant changes to the model all right so that's kind of an overview of how you can take your model from start to finish from Sketchup into twin motion I will get into other things more in depth like the different settings and other things like that in future videos but I wanted to give you a good place to get started so you knew how to get started and how to get to the finish remember to follow that link in the notes down below and download this while it's free if you like this video please remember to click that like button down below if you're new around here remember to click that subscribe button for new Sketchup content every week if you like what I'm doing in this channel please consider supporting me on patreon every little bit helps even if it's only a dollar a month so make sure you check out that link in the notes down below but in any case thank you so much for taking the time to watch this I really appreciate it not we'll catch you in the next video thanks guys

Channel: TheSketchUpEssentials

Views: 56,498

Rating: 4.9641256 out of 5

Keywords: thesketchupessentials, the sketchup essentials, sketchup tutorials, sketchup lessons, sketchup modeling, sketchup 2018, architecture, sketchup tutorial, justin geis, sketchup, twinmotion rendering, sketchup twinmotion, twinmotion beginner tutorial, twinmotion free, twinmotion free download, sketchup real time rendering, real time rendering, architectural rendering tutorial, twinmotion beginner workflow, twinmotion and sketchup, sketchup rendering

Id: zbGz0w2FV14

Length: 24min 25sec (1465 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 15 2019