Rhino to Twinmotion Tutorial - Exporting data from Rhino3D using the new Datasmith Rhino Exporter

hi this is phil from simply rhino and in this short video i'd like to take a look at getting rhino data into twin motion using the new datasmith translator here i'm using rhino7 and twin motion 2021.1.3 and for the purposes of this video i'm using the windows platform twin motion is an architectural visualization tool from which you can create still images panoramas video and vr from your rhino data twin motion is easy to use and learn and is modestly priced once your rhino data is inside twin motion it's easy to add materials animated people and vehicles trees and vegetation and it's also easy to change location season and weather all with simple slider-based controls so to download the data smith plugin we need to go to the unreal engine website i'll put the address in the description below and also on the screen but this is an unreal plugin and not a twin motion specific plugin if we scroll down the page and go to the rhino exporter this shows the old exporter here so what we need to do is to go to the preview version so it's unreal engine 4.27 windows preview or mac of course if you're on that platform and download the file from here this plugin will export rhino data either into twin motion or unreal and the idea is that going forward you can use your data in twin motion for example to create a simple vr exercise and then if you go beyond the limits of twin motion you can very easily move that data to unreal once we've downloaded the installer we can double click to run select rhino 7 and finish it's always a good idea to restart your machine after installing a plugin if we open rhino after installing the plugin we should see a new tab called datasmith and this will have four buttons synchronize connections export 3d view and messages this is the rhino model that we're going to bring into twin motion and first many thanks to ott kandra for the use of this model ott is an architect who uses rhino and grasshopper and this model is a personal project called hybrid pavilion first we need to consider some important things in the model the units need to be set to meters as in this case or inches and it makes sense to organize the model as we normally would do in rhino making use of layers and sub layers so that we can turn on or off various parts of the model in twin motion just as we would do in rhino we can use blank layers in rhino as a folder for sub layers and this methodology is recognized in twin motion once inside twin motion we can rearrange existing layers and create new layers or containers as they're called in twin motion i've applied materials to the geometry inside of rhino and if i switch to rendered view and look at some of the parts in here you'll see that we've got several materials here that are all applied to various parts of the model the default proposition in twin motion is that materials are replaced globally what i mean by this is that if in rhino all of the elements of this hexagonal lattice structure have the same material applied to them then once inside of twin motion if i use the picker to select one hexagonal component and change the material then the material for all of the lattice structure will update accordingly let's now look first at using export 3d view to take this rhino geometry into twin motion so if i go to export 3d view and then navigate to a destination this will write out a new data smith file and you'll see that this is written out fairly quickly next i open up the epic games launcher and launch twin motion once inside twin motion i can import my data smith file from here so i'll navigate to the file and in the options instead of collapse by material i can choose keep hierarchy which will preserve our rhino layer structure uv texturing is handled from rhino so if you have specific uv mapping requirements then do this in rhino before exporting you may find it useful to use a dummy texture to set the mapping the units will convert one to one unless we disable the auto setting here and then we can set the value manually hitting ok will now bring in our rhino geometry if i open up the right hand side panel i'll see the various rhino layers or containers as they're called in twin motion unlike rhino however i'll see all the separate geometry elements each of the meshes for the hex shading or each of the b reps solids and surfaces for the plaza a very quick tip which is the equivalent of zoom selected in rhino is to go to the top level which is hybrid pavilion and just type f this will zoom to the extents of the whole of the rhino model and we'll now see our model is sitting inside our twin motion world twin motion uses a pivot that is similar to the rhino gumball and using the rhino navigation mode in twin motion alt plus right mouse button orbits around the pivot so if i select a single object rather than the whole scene and hit f i can now zoom to that object and orbit around it if i zoom out again you'll see that i have a brick texture on some of the terrain components this is an example of a dummy texture that i mentioned earlier in rhino i grouped several terrain surfaces together and then applied a planar mapping to them if i now open up the panel on the left hand side and go to materials and then ground and then nature for example i can drag a grass texture onto here and you'll see that each of these elements will have the same mapping the mapping is just like rhino independent of the material so the grass texture is now applied consistently across these surfaces if i go to the hex shading container or layer here for example and hit f you'll see that the elements in here can be independently moved and this is something that was difficult to do with the old direct link method so if i wanted to move for example this element here then all of these other concrete elements would come with it so likewise if i go to open up the hex shading here and try and select one of the elements then i can move individual elements separately from their material binding let's now take a look at the data smith direct link so to start with here i have both rhino and twin motion open if i go to import inside of twin motion this time i'll use direct link rather than geometry and i'll see here the rhino file that i have open if i have more than one rhino file open or indeed any other programs that twin motion will support i'll see the files in this list here i'll choose the rhino file from the list and then i'll see the options collapse by material or keep hierarchy but other than that i'll have less import options here than when we use the geometry option i'll choose keep hierarchy and hit ok and this will process the direct link and the geometry will come into twin motion as before there may be some confusion with the terminology here but when we choose direct link as in this example we're actually using the new data smith translator under the hood now if your geometry doesn't come in when you link the file just use the synchronize button here and that will push the geometry into twin motion i'm just going to collapse the containers here and pick the pavilion container now if i move to rhino and do something fairly major let's take this whole canopy and move it vertically for example i can then update the twin motion file accordingly by pushing the synchronize button and you'll see that my geometry updates here and if i undo in rhino and push the geometry again you'll see that twin motion keeps up with rhino in rhino we can add new objects delete objects create new layers etc and push these changes to twin motion if i now save the twin motion file and then quit both rhino and twin motion i should then be able to open both these files again and twin motion will remake the connection i can confirm this with the connections button so after you've used rhino and twin motion together you can save both files and open them up again the following day or week and as long as you've got both of the files open the two files will link one of the cool things about direct linking is that we can link more than one file and those files can come from different sources so for example we could have a twin motion file open that is linked to a rhino file a revit file and a sketchup file and you can work in all of these programs concurrently pushing geometry to twin motion as you go if i open the twin motion file without rhino i'll see the link here is showing as being broken so if i go to rhino and open up the hybrid pavilion file then you'll see that this re-establishes the link i'll cover adding twin motion assets such as materials people vegetation and looking at how we can change the weather and season etc in a separate video but one thing i do want to make clear is that twin motion does have a fairly heavy requirement for hardware and one of these requirements is that it ideally needs a dedicated video card with eight gigabytes of ram whilst inside of twin motion i can open up the statistics panel here and this will show you the frame rate and i'll see the thumbs up symbol if this is acceptable the frame rate is of course influenced by the complexity of the geometry so here if i turn off the hexagonal structure of the pavilion the frame rate will increase to give you an idea of the setup that i'm using here this is a 16 core amd ryzen 9 machine with 64 gigabytes of ram and an 8 gigabyte pny quadro rtx 4000 graphics card and this is giving acceptable results if i go to preferences i can change the quality settings manually or automatically based on the system specifications here the automatic setting will put the quality to ultra but i reduced the setting to high to speed up the frame rate whilst i was putting the model together these settings control the sort of general feedback on the quality that we're seeing in the real real time preview here and you'll see that when i move from high to ultra the frame rate dropped i'll also see feedback on gpu and cpu usage in the statistics panel so that's about the end of what i wanted to cover in this video thanks for watching and please feel free to leave any comments below if you found this video useful then please hit the like button and remember that to keep up with the latest developments in rhino then you can subscribe to this channel at simply rhino we offer training for rhino and all its key plugins so check out our website for more details thanks again for watching and i'll catch up with you in the next video you

Channel: Simply Rhino 3D Tutorials & Events

Views: 66,929

Keywords: Rhino3D, Twinmotion

Id: elrqI2KD88g

Length: 13min 35sec (815 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 18 2021