Twinmotion 2023 Tutorial: Create Animated Urban Scene in Only 30 Mins

[Music] hi everybody and Jonathan here with another twin motion 2023 video now this is the first time I've done a tutorial on the new version and I was blown away by the renderings and the animation I produced for this amazing Urban project to visualize a museum in a nice Urban context in this tutorial you're going to learn how to basically set up camera views adjust textures enhance the model with people trees and lots of life and basically render out some amazing animations and visuals so I really do hope you enjoy this tutorial it was definitely fun to make and I will be sharing all the files so if you want to follow along you're more than welcome so as ever thanks for watching and if you are new around here please drop a like And subscribe it really helps the channel and motivate me to make lots more videos for you so thanks for watching Everybody enjoy the video [Music] so let's get into this the first thing I'm going to do is pop down to the import tab click plus and we're going to go ahead and select the geometry of our file let's click open and this is a file that I'm going to be able to share with you so have a look in the description I'll put a link in and I'll basically share the Cinema 4D file so you can also do the same thing and follow the tutorial if you would like to because I know that's something my subscribers have been requesting for a little while okay so here we are here's a Paul's file very kind of him to share this wonderful file with me and basically it's a cinema for default it's about 35 megabytes I'm going to go ahead and import and open this one now do remember there's a few different options here um I'm gonna go for keep hierarchy just because I might want flexibility um but it may be that this will also work quite nicely with collapse my material as well we'll see so let's click import and it will basically read and extract the data I'm going to go click OK and just sort of go ahead and just see how the model comes in in this first instance so as you can see if you have a quick look around the model once imported it's pretty amazing we've got a lot of detail down at street level and we've got these lovely sort of background buildings if you like now I know this was done in a mixture of vectorworks and Cinema 4D so cool tells me um so I can see a few problems that I'm going to need to fix right away but what I'm going to do is kind of basically get down onto the project and just sort of choose a few use that I'm going to kind of work at and basically the first problem I'm going to try and fix is the material scaling now this sometimes happens when you import files okay so what we'll do we'll click t for texture I'm simply going to go on to our texture tool sunflower material and basically that would allow us to basically click into the model and select that texture as you can see and for some reason it just sort of looks like it's scaled way up too much so I'm going to scale it down it looks like it's scaling uh by a factor of 10 actually I could be wrong but that maybe is what's going on so let's just scale that down that looks a lot better already so basically wherever you see these sort of texture problems just use the texture tool okay so what we're going to do next is just spend a bit of time fixing some of these materials now of course I can go down and then select some of my sort of brick materials for example and just sort of apply some nicer materials so I'm going to go just spend a few minutes running around the model applying these materials and again if you want me to sort of send over the twin motion file I will basically let's go through and get some nice reflective glass on those and I think that's looking good maybe I'll just reduce that opacity a little bit there actually I want it pretty reflective to be honest so that we kind of don't see into the buildings because there's not that much detail in there um another thing that I'll be doing is just basically replacing things like the asphalt so let's go ahead and do this bit now I think let's go to a ground go to my maid and basically let's just drag on a couple of different asphalts now what I quite like to do here is select the color and basically just you know just sort of lighten or darken um the different textures so I think actually what I'll do is just darken that road down so the Color Picker always pops up in the middle of the screen let's just darken that down a bit good okay so this is what we're going to do we're going to spend a little bit of time just recording um this process and then we'll come back in a minute and I'll run on to the next stage so okay so we're doing pretty well and we basically start to texture up our model quite a bit more and mess around with these different materials just sort of getting them to look a lot better than the defaults don't forget that you can also drag the materials in um from the browser here and what one thing to note is if you do find there's lots of materials that you don't need anymore because you've tried to add a few if you select them o and just click the delete key that will actually delete all the materials that are unused so you're only left with really materials are actually used in the project now they're another really nice tip is nothing is perfect so one of the things I do like to do at the next stage is just start to add a bit of grunge and you can see as well as a bit of grunge sometimes a little bit of adjustment of the roughness now you don't want this too shiny but just to sort of add a bit of a pop to the model so select this road let's get a bit of grunge and you can just see that really kind of helps now one lovely thing is when you click the path tracing both the grunge but also the things like Reflections look amazing so just clicked R for that path tracing to kick in and if I go down to my low settings just for now while I'm working that'll be pretty Zippy I'm not quite saying I can work in real time but almost you know you can almost visualize in real time with a good graphics card okay so I think I'll probably do most of my work in the normal settings that's absolutely fine okay so I think next up I just want to kind of replace a few more materials here that's kind of darken that down so basically I'll keep working on this for a little bit more and my next step is we're going to be doing some Entourage so I'm going to be looking at things like replacing the cars and the people okay so in order to do this I'm going to go to my selection tool click onto this car here so I managed to select my cars and if you did want to you could actually type in the search dialog so we could type in the word car and basic search you can pretty much see they're all in here now one thing I have noticed is they're all kind of grouped together as one big group so I'm going to need to delete some of these well that's not a problem because I can rapidly add some twin motion ones back in I think I'll be a bit selective so let's go and add a few new cars let's go to vehicles and basically cars now do you remember what's nice is you can select a bunch of these in one go in fact I'm just going to select all of them and just fairly randomly Place some of these cars parked along the strip of the building what I'm going to get is hopefully a fairly randomized choice of car each time okay that's looking good and basically then what I'll be able to do is swap a few of these out as well so definitely is choosing a random car as I go around and this time I can click and I'll basically be able to rotate that afterwards okay so we'll go ahead and play some cut and then what we'll do is we'll come back and look at how we play some people and this is going to be a really nice and it'll really bring the scene to life quite rapidly so what I'm now going to do is basically change some of the things like the weather and so on so to do this I'm going to go to my Ambience and basically I can adjust the weather sort of globally okay and you can see you get some really nice sort of different effects on here but actually because I want to keep this fairly straightforward I'm going to basically create a new image and do it within the image and I think this is always a better idea because then you can quit to Media mode and go back to the normal sort of unaltered state if you like so let's go ahead and adjust this and I'm going to make this just a little bit more rainy now that looks really nice I really love the the rain there let's just kind of adjust this weather here and you can make it snow and things like this of course let's maybe have a look at that a bit later let's just keep it sort of Fairly um not raining but just so slightly post rain okay so that's already looking good you can also see some nice sort of clouds in the sky so definitely you can play around with things like the uh North angle as well to sort of get those sort of different Shadow times coming into the model and that's something that I always love with twin motion just searching for that sort of best time of day as well and you can see those lovely sort of hard Shadows coming in um so I think we'll kind of just go through to sort of yeah that looks pretty good that's fine okay so there we go there's my first image um let's click okay so just compare that to where we started with quit Media mode look pretty uh Bland if you like and then the actual first image itself one thing I would recommend also is on your very first image go to the settings and just crank this up to 4K quality because that will mean that all the other images you then create afterwards will be 4K and that's my sort of preferred image quality as a sort of starting point for rendering okay so what we'll do we'll kind of move forward to a different vantage point now if you want to stay at eye level remember to click m m will put you down at sort of almost like a pedestrian type level so that's a really good sort of view of your eyesight at that particular eye level because it is quite easy especially if you're moving sort of quite fast to basically sort of take off and I just sometimes want to reset that down to my eye level okay so I've set up a number of images here different sort of conditions and different views as well now if you do find that as you're going you need to sort of click on some of the textures and fix them then that's you know something that I would definitely recommend with twin motion as you go through so I would like to just darken that down a bit that building there and also I want to introduce a bit of grunge onto that sort of brickwork to make it look a bit less realistic so that will really really help as we go through the process this building here for example is looking very light so again I'm just going to kind of darken that right down take away that sort of focal point if you like so these are the kind of things that you'll want to do as you go through um no particular order as you do this you can kind of just do it as when you sort of spot the problem like this white here is very very blown out so let me kind of just drop that right there in terms of quality and color that looks a lot better and this one here you get the idea okay so what we're going to do next then is set up some um basically animation parts and then what we'll do we'll fix a few of the materials that we need to on that particular animation path now the main focal point of this project that Paul told me about was that this historical building was sort of set in some context and that's why he kind of modeled the rest of this city scene so what we're going to do we're going to basically reset our image to at this point here I think we're going to kind of walk up the street as if we're heading to that image so what I'm going to do then to set my first animation is go to Media let's just pop this panel and go to video check out my eye level which I am going to click on my plus point and basically add my first keyframe so we're going to kind of put it into sort of medium speed um just sort of walk through down that road and basically the key with this is to try to get your animation frames fairly sort of evenly spaced out otherwise you find that you speed up at some point so let's just click M again and click plus so already if I want to I can just rewind here we go let's just sort of preview that very nice little simple animation it's already looking interesting but it's going to look a lot better by the time we finish this I promise you okay so let's keep doing this let's kind of carry on a bit forward I might actually speed things up a little bit here and I'll just click M to get down to that eye level again and eventually uh try and sort of state so if if you do need to just clip back onto the original image yeah you can see sometimes depending on where the camera is facing it's easy to drop down okay so let's just click M to get back to eye level okay so I'm going to preview that little section there what I'm looking for is just to make sure it doesn't sort of speed up too much okay so that's looking right so far so we're getting a bit closer to our sort of intended destination building now so let's go through a bit more click M I'm going a bit closer to this side of the sort of street now if you like and we'll walk by because I want to kind of focus on that building as we kind of swing by okay so now what I'm Keen to do I'm going to go into sort of slow mode and see if I can basically pan around still moving forward a bit tricky while almost like I'm looking out the window and looking at that building and we're just going to kind of do a bit of a sideways pan just to show it off to the best let me click on that so I just want to kind of re play this little bit of keyframe through yeah okay that looks pretty cool so I just want to see if I add a bit more time into the whole thing let's go for 30 seconds let's rewind so it should be pretty quick at the beginning and then it will kind of go a bit faster okay but the problem with this is you've just got to get the pace right otherwise it looks very strange when it kind of really speeds up when you add the keyframes quite close together um so I just want to check out that this works now I've spotted a problem there was a massive car here and I think I know what's happened there that's actually from the original set of cars yeah it is um so let me just sort of delete that one okay that was on top and the good thing is you can just sort of stop and carry on at any time okay so this is where it's going to start speeding up if anything now with a bit more time in that is actually probably okay I'm fairly happy so we'll carry on moving down here just to show off that whole elevation of that building and we'll add another keyframe in and I think we'll do one more kind of just look back at the entire sort of elevation of that building if you like so it's actually quite a nice little shot there okay so let's play one more time from about this point onwards just to check so this is what I recommend you just check things as you go if it looks weird then I will show you another technique in a second where you can actually get this looking pretty good but I'm fairly happy with that it's actually not too bad excellent let's go ahead and create one more image and this time what I'm Keen to do is try out the hdri sky so I'm going to click enable and load in one of my hdris now at the moment um you can see I've got a pretty bright one so if I open up the details of that it's actually already fairly bright so let's just change that to a little bit darker let's try rotating it round and see how that works that's pretty nice and I can turn on whether it affects the lighting or not or not okay so I think it looks better with the lighting being affected of course um I can also want to go over to my libraries and materials I've got loads of additional hdris I can load in so I'm Keen to just try a slightly different one now some of these I haven't actually downloaded yet so if I do want to I just basically click on to the download button and hopefully that will kind of take a few seconds and you can see it's downloading pretty quickly so I don't know how this is going to work but let's just drag this into the scene and we'll be able to compare this with the previous one so it's definitely something that I recommend uh searching for now that looks quite dramatic so I think what I might do is just up the intensity a little bit I'll just try a slightly different rotation okay that's actually looking really quite cool I'm quite liking that it's almost like a slightly sort of Sunrise atmosphere and the good thing is I can easily sort of just boost up the things like the ambient lighting as well um so if I do want to I could just kind of go down let's just tone that weather down a little bit that looks nice and just boost up that exposure level just a tab now do you remember one other thing um so that's actually really nice I like that for you so just look where I started in fact if I quit Media mode altogether this is where I started in the media mode here is my first image looks nice with a bit of kind of water on the pavement and basically the second one not keen on that one actually that one looks good but I think what I'll do with this one I'll just try a different sky let's go for something a bit more overcast um so let's try downloading a few of these okay so the thing is you've just got to try these out really one thing I would recommend is you click favorites so make sure your favorite the ones you have downloaded and sometimes a bit tricky to actually sort of see which ones you've actually got downloaded there okay so let's go down to our hdri and when one of these is downloaded let's try this one's going to be a bit dark I think actually it's quite a nice sort of uh feel and look particularly I think if I just take that exposure level down a little bit as well um let me just try fiddling around with the intensity yeah that's actually really nice it's sort of kind of like a sunsety sort of type time of day so I might just adjust that round just so those Shadows aren't quite as dramatic actually you know what I really really like this one I'm going to try one more okay so let's do another image and let's go for something really dramatic um so let's go for one of these sort of really dramatic sunsets here let's try maybe this one here so you know this is definitely a really good way just to preview to find out uh with the same pretty much the same image which lighting you prefer before you kind of go ahead and set up things like the animations okay so I think what we'll do is going to download which ones that we got this one here drag that one in hdri is a very quick way to completely change the look of your image and it's definitely something I recommend you try out and that actually looks really nice so with a little bit of an adjustment there that looks quite cool let's change that light in there to see what happens we kind of scan through yeah it looks really nice I love this sort of preview now don't forget to click R to get the ray traced effect the one downside of the ray tracing is you'll notice that you will need to pump up the intensity level to a good level okay so if you're going to use the ray tracing basically at the intensity there's one other Factor you probably need to go through to your lighting and basically up the exposure and go into the details and get the sum um Sun intensity I'm looking for there we go yeah okay so I normally make that about I don't know 5 10 something like that so let's just let that render out for a second and yeah look at that image that looks stunning so if you compare the difference between not non-ray Trace real-time rendering and path Trace um very very different look of the image as well bearing in mind I'm just in low quality and this will be much nicer when I do the high quality renders later okay so I'll leave you to have a play around with the hdris and the lighting and those sort of things let's look at the next section which is adding that Entourage and bringing the image to life okay so we're ready to start setting up our animation so let's go ahead before we put our Entourage in let's click on the video and what we'll do we'll click our plus frame to get our first video now do remember if you're going to change the lighting now is the time to do this so I'm going to go down to my hdri and enable Okay now I'm going to go and drop in the sky that I really really liked from before just to get that nice dramatic sort of lighting and I'm just going to go through to get that nice sort of time of day basically don't forget that you can actually open up all these sub settings but the main sort of hero items are all available for you uh one of the two thing to remember is on the camera setting as well as things like the focal length which are quite nice to adapt um so I'm going to go down to a sort of 20 millimeter lens which will be a quite a nice sort of cinematic effect I can actually put a bit of depth of field on okay but with the depth of field you're going to want to sort of set that distance to something a bit further away so basically you can see with it enabled a tiny sort of difference I think on that depth of field this will come across probably much more in the video don't forget we've also got these nice composition overlays okay and this is really useful now to help you sort of frame up your video as well as your sort of instill images so I'll actually turn off that one and I'm going to turn on the video action safe so now you can see this really nice little framed up setting and let's sort of keep that focal point um about 50 I think is a really good sort of set here okay so I'm pretty happy with my first keyframe let's move down this street so I'm going to click say number four to get my medium speed I'm going to wander down the street a little bit and click Plus let's go down a bit more now try and keep the amount of movement similar each time let me just click M again just to resend the view and we'll kind of wander down I think what I'll do to begin with I'll just do a nice little wander down all the way down the street to this kind of Junction and that looks good so let's have a little click play of course it goes really fast so we're going to add a bit more time in here so I'm going to say about 30 seconds of Animation so this should give me a very nice note this is super helpful isn't it just keeping on these keyframes as we're working um in a minute I'll be able to turn those off obviously when we render those full video you won't see those at all so um if you do spot something as I did there as you're moving through like a car on top of the car just basically stop and sort this out as you go through and by the way with the Cars one thing I really like with those cars is that you can actually just sort of Click onto color just sort of swap out the color as well just a little less side okay so now I can carry on I'm wandering around my animation and um yeah that's looking really interesting another thing another thing that might be quite nice is to play around with the lighting changing at different times of the day so have a look at that in another section as well so I've set up a couple of animations already I'm just going to set one more wrap so basically here I am clicking them down to get to pedestrian level let's set my first keyframe I'm just going to walk along let's get a little bit slower here and basically I don't know the keyframe and I really want to sort of turn this corner to reveal the building um just to give an experience of what it might be like driving out kind of just turn this corner so it's a really nice how you can almost Drive in real time I really like this new sort of uh camera safe and video Safe mechanisms here and there we go that looks absolutely gorgeous as we turn that corner there and now we can have a look at our building as we go by so that's definitely something I recommend you just sort of drive by and try and click keyframes every sort of Fairly even you as you go through and I'll show you some great little tips for adding even more detail in a second I think one more keyframe and we'll be done okay so let's review that little video there let's just add a nice amount of time in and hopefully it'll be nice and smooth as we go through now if you do find it a bit distracting seeing the camera safe when you want to review basically just gone to the camera turn off the composition and just disable so that will do it for the entire video but while you're creating the video you can see it's super useful now that looks really cool um just kind of approaching from this direction you get a different nice sort of set of lighting conditions as you go around this corner and it reveals itself as we approach the museum building itself so very very nice I'm really happy with the reflections and lighting I like this sort of brightness here um it's not perfect but you know for this tutorial it's not bad and it's quite rapid to do okay so I've got three really nice video clips so the next thing we're going to do is we're going to bring this to life with people Entourage moving cars and that kind of thing and look at how we can create things like character paths okay so the very first thing I'm going to do is focus a little bit on decals um so if I go down to my objects you'll notice we've got loads of different decals now this is actually really nice because basically what I can do is just sort of drag a few of these decals onto the road and things like that as it were now that isn't a very good place for a box Junction I know it gives you a bit of an idea it just adds a lot more detail or you know I could kind of add in a bike lane symbol there so have a little scroll through these things like these manholes add quite a nice bit of detail to the model and of course things like a bit of graffiti sometimes and some staining on the roads as well now all of these it's quite nice it can be sort of scaled up or scaled down you can change the depth and things like the Sorting border as well now I certainly don't want any graffiti on that building there but let's just add a little bit onto one or two of these just to sort of show you the effect of adding that extra detail now I'm not condoning graffiti although some of it is actually very very cool let's just sort of give a bit of life to this scene with a few more things going on um okay that's actually pretty cool good okay so you get the idea that definitely is something we can do onto our scene we can kind of change the opacity as well I'm going to just sort of fade it down a bit more to get a bit more detail in there so already that's actually looking a lot nicer now that's Entourage and do be aware if you click the path tracing button now even though I need to adjust the lighting if I go for path tracing you will see that you've still got those decals in there so I'll try and render out some half traced animations but to begin with I'm definitely going to be working in the real-time rendering simply because it's so much faster okay so next up what we're going to do is come out a pedestrian level in fact I'm going to quit Media mode back into the normal mode now so I really want to kind of bring this to life with a few more people let's just get a little bit more uh graffiti definitely don't want any graffiti on the building itself we're pretty happy to have a bet on some of these sort of side buildings as well right so let's go for it we're going to go to populate um but actually what I'm Keen to do is I'm going to go to my paths so the first thing we're going to do is a character path okay so for this I'm going to basically just zoom right out and I'm going to set up a really nice sort of character path basically just walking all the way down the street so we're going to have one walking all the way down this sidewalk and let's just sort of pan across and we're going to kind of walk down to here and then we're going to turn the corner a little bit and let me just see if I can orbit around that view just sort of walk down that road there okay not perfect but that's not too bad I can always go down and select the account to path afterwards so it's closed down the model there should find all the things that I've added including that character path so I should be able to kind of Select it at any time and if I want to do a little bit of tweaking I can so just sort of be aware that that's something you can do afterwards can be a bit fiddly from this distance okay so let's go ahead and put another character path in so we go to populate character path click on the pen and base it this time it's going to kind of have people walking up this Little Road here you need to put an extra few points in as they turn the corner and let's have them walking up to well to the end of the street I guess that's pretty reasonable and Escape okay so let me get down to eye level I can already see a few people spawned in so that's cool definitely need a few over this side as well but just before we go any further just click onto my character path you'll notice that I can actually change the width of it a little bit and also the density so I can have a few more people um I could probably even have them walking both ways by actually copying the path okay so what I might do is do copy and then paste and then reverse the direction okay I will need to just move that path a little bit so let me select it and now get my move tool and basically let's just kind of be very careful and move it across just a tiny bit oh that was rotating let's go on to our axis and we're just going to move it across a little bit just so people aren't sort of crashing into each other and there's my first one in fact I'll move that one back a tiny bit more okay so let me get down to eye level it looks quite nice now we've got this sort of level of realism as people kind of walk down the street so that's about it for this particular tutorial what we'll do we'll play out with the final footage that I've produced in the making of this video for you so thanks for watching everybody see you next time [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] thank you foreign [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: Jonathan Reeves CAD

Views: 9,869

Keywords: Twinmotion, Twinmotion 2023 Preview, Twinmotion Release Trailer, twinmotion animation, twinmotion render, twinmotion revit, twinmotion architecture, Twinmotion new release, Twinmotion New Version, Enscape alternative, Lumion alternative, Twinmotion Libraries, Learn Twinmotion, Twinmotion Book, What's new in Twinmotion, Rendering, Twinmotion2023, Twinmotion 2023 New Interface, Twinmotion 2023.2, Twinmotion 2023.1 Preview 2, New Release, First Impressions, Cinematic Animation

Id: fxuI2Gq5eHk

Length: 31min 23sec (1883 seconds)

Published: Wed May 17 2023