Twinmotion 23 Interior Tutorial

hi everybody David here with VR render thanks for taking the time to check out this video in this video which is another in the build this with me series we're going to be taking a look at the creation of an interior render using both SketchUp and twin motion 2023. I'll take you through the steps from the initial construction and SketchUp all the way to the finished project all right let's go ahead and get started okay everybody so here you can see we are in SketchUp and we've got a pretty basic build here there's nothing kind of too complicated it's a basic room we still have our scale measurement here and we've got some trees that we downloaded now these objects are downloadable from the warehouse if you search for just background and you can just drop them into your scene they are by default about 4K but they have a pretty low overhead as opposed to putting in full 3d trees you can see it's a relatively straightforward build there are a couple of things that I do want you to be mindful of though before we bounce over to Twin motion the first and I'm gonna move my camera out of the way over here is if you're using a lot of assets from the warehouse please note that when it comes to the Styles you can change the default style you can see over here on the right SketchUp comes with quite a number of them now some of these are going to have extremely limited use cases but what's important for us is the default styles and these ones here that have the logo of a fast modeling style they'll have that little Green Dot and this is important because when you start bringing in Warehouse models particularly Warehouse models that have a lot of polys in them or maybe were not built in the cleanest possible way you are going to find SketchUp is going to slow down so it's really good to be able to put one of these on you can put on things like the Shaded or shaded with textures if you want to see your actual artwork for example you'll want to have that turned on but the interior design one right here on the left this I found to be very very useful what it effectively does is turn off the profiles which means basically each line that SketchUp draws it's cutting that number down by effectively half and that will Speed Up Performance a lot in addition you'll also notice a couple of other things gone ahead and built our entire scene using Warehouse assets there's a reason for this really it's just choice and availability tune motion has some wonderful assets but if you're doing just a strict interior I really do tend to lean on the actual assets from the warehouse there's also just a lot more Choice the flip of that is when we get over to Twin motion we are going to have to spend a lot more time adding twin motion materials to a lot of these assets in addition in terms of interior design style we've gone for a very clean look we're going to be using a lot of whites and Browns a very neutral color palette and hopefully we'll get a nice warm inviting interior when all of that is done one other thing that you should be mindful of when it comes to SketchUp is making sure that your objects are very flush great example of this is an object that I brought in over here you can see this looks pretty nice but when I spin my camera you'll actually notice this object right here is floating so you really want to be mindful of that let me go in select this hit M on the keyboard and I'm going to drag this down you want to get it where it says on face and then that should be pretty much good to go okay one other thing you may want to be mindful of if you're bringing in content from the warehouse is texture size and what I'm going to do is show you just a quick little way that you can fix that in the next section a lot of these objects that you might bring in Without Really realizing may have very large textures or materials applied to them and this will really bog down your scene SketchUp was never intended to have really you know 4K texture maps in it now there is an option under the settings that allows you to use maximum texture size but it's going to slow things down quite a bit so what we want to do is go to the extension warehouse and I'm going to click on this extension Warehouse that'll bring that up and I'm going to type in r e s i and resizer this is a handy little extension and I'm looking at this one right here material resizer and click on that it is free which is really really nice it does come from the SketchUp team themselves and all you have to do is install it so once it's installed you can just run the extension and it will actually resize your texture maps for you so we can go extensions material resizer and you can see here you have options to select all of the materials in your scene or disable some and you can put the basically materials to a specific size so in this case I know that almost all of these materials are going to be replaced with twin motion materials so I put these down to five one two so just a 512 by 512 which is a very small texture size by today's standards and all you have to do is Click go and it'll run through the entire process converting all of your textures anything that's larger than 512 will be converted down basically downsizing it it's incredibly handy but really speed up your scene it's very useful when you're going to another program and not doing some sort of internal SketchUp render it's time to send this over to Twin motion and to do that we're going to use the twin motion data Smith exporter now this is available here you can see from the Twin motion website go to twinmotion.com plugins and you can see that we have really just data Smith exporters for a whole variety of different software and the one you're looking for is going to be down here at the bottom which will be the SketchUp Pro you can download it I believe it downloads as an executable so all you have to do is download and fire it up to get it to work and when you start up SketchUp it should be there waiting for you to actually get this working all we need to do is go to export to data Smith file click on that and it will export effectively basically a data Smith connection all right let's do that click here and I'm going to place it pretty much in my where my folder is for my SketchUp model all right go ahead and turn on Twin motion and you can see this is what we have right now and again we are using twin motion 2023 so if you're using an older version of twin motion interface is going to be radically different strongly recommend that you update to the newest version of twin motion this is the interface that we'll be using it's also just a much better better program and a much nicer interface if you're new to Twin motion let's do a brief overview of the interface if you're familiar with the interface feel free to skip ahead a little bit but if you're new you'll see a couple of things first you have your actual viewport your working viewport and this is just the default startup scene for you know generic project very similar to what you get in the Unreal Engine currently over here on the left we have a library materials objects uh tools and people and characters and the Crystal Mega scans Library also if we wanted to add lights these will be here as well over on the right we have a scene tree which will give us everything from controlling the overall environment all the way to all of the objects in our scene it was very similar if you've worked in a lot of other programs that have or use some sort of nested folders for really just organization very handy to have down the bottom left we have tabs I can control the view for the interface and for the stats now this will come into play a little bit later on if we decide we want to drop the resolution of our scene just by working just to speed things up I'm going to go ahead and hide both of those again and then on the very bottom let's turn off Ambience as well let's make sure we're not on that one let's go back to the scene there we go and on the bottom we have really the primary uh sort of interface buttons for getting content into and out of twin motion so that's going to be the Import and Export buttons and then also we have controls for materials populate which we probably won't really use in this project but I'll just mention it briefly later on and then media so controls over you know really the importing and exporting quality settings for our content all right what we want to look at though is import let's bring in our data Smith file effectively creating a connection between the SketchUp data Smith that you've exported and this one here so click on import you can see it goes blue nice click here to import now you may run into some issues with I have found the data smith thing can be a bit finicky to work with generally it's smart enough that when you create the direct link in SketchUp it does seem to know where to find that and I'm not really sure how that works but just note that sometimes this directly can get stuck on your previous Project's direct link I don't know if that's just a bug or just user error on my behalf and sometimes you'll just have to find the older direct link files and delete them but this one seems to have done a pretty good job it's found the SketchUp build this with me number two and I'm going to leave everything on its sort of default settings collapse my material is on Full Precision UVS around that's pretty much it that should be enough to get you up and running let's go ahead and click import all right and you can see here we've got a little broken link icon here you do have three dots and you can go ahead and delete and you can go into some of the settings but what we need to do is actually bounce back to SketchUp I'm going to turn on toggle auto sync and by the way if you want to see if this is working you can see this by going manage connections and click on it and you can see there we go build this with me so the connection has effectively been made the two are able to communicate with each other which is awesome and I am going to just hit Sync here synchronize and if all goes well that will send to Twin motion all right so you can see our SketchUp scene has popped right over to Twin motion it is sort of aligned correctly with how it would be in SketchUp so I lift this model up a little bit off the floor and that's why things seem to be floating you can see our scale reference here and our backdrop plane came in just fine all right that looks pretty good all right I'm using the W ASD keys to navigate and using the Q and E key to rise up and down and it's time to go ahead and just start setting up our basic scene here before that though I do want to talk a little bit about some of the settings so if you hit Ctrl p on your keyboard or if you just go up here to file and I'm sorry edit and preferences you'll bring up this now you probably will actually spend quite a bit of time in this if you've been using twin motion at all or you just want to improve performance there's a couple of things to be mindful of before you go too far the unit system change it to whatever you use locally uh here in the US I'm going to use feet timestamp you can use this really put this in whatever you want 24 12 hours it's not going to make any visual difference but more just in terms of you know if you're adjusting to a specific time now other things you do want to be really careful of um graphic Hardware sport I think this has been on direct12 for quite a while at this point you it's probably what you're using by default now path Tracer we will talk about this quite a bit later on when we render stuff out but by default some of the path Tracer settings tend to actually be pretty strong or pretty pronouncedly hefty you may want to drop these down so for example my low preset is much lower than the default that comes with twin motion and we'll talk about this a little bit more later on but just be mindful of that if you want quick rapid results or just a quick idea of how your path Tracer is starting to look feel free to go in here and drop this especially on the low preset you can put that pretty low samples per pixel I found three and three bounces is fine if you just want to know does this thing look okay okay probes um this is kind of to do with Reflections generally I'll put these quite low in the viewport um you know just keep them low really it's going to just determine kind of how Reflections look in the viewport um it is indicative somewhat of how they'll look later on but for export put that up to 10 24. Skydome resolution I will generally keep this low just to speed up performance um we will use a Skydome to light up our scene which is basically a big dome that sits above your scene and provides High dynamic range lighting looks really really nice but in the viewport you don't really need this to look really impressive just go ahead and put that to low and on export put it to hide all right grass fading probably not relevant for this project hopefully generally I'll put this to near most of the grass in programs like twin motion or you know D5 or whatever you kind of want to not work with these on full they are hugely resource of intensive and so grass fading is just going to taper them off visually they'll still be there when you render it but they're not being rendered pretty much every second that you're in the program um just a little thing to turn that down all right um direct link we're good um save and Export auto save twin motion 2023 is very stable but you want to turn auto save on I've set mine to about 11 minutes um and it'll automatically set up a path for you and I believe it'll if you set the number here it'll just keep overriding the files but you definitely want to set up auto save all right export vsync all of this stuff not hugely important all right the next thing that is important is the quality settings over here now quite simply you may have the best results just by asking you know tune motion to figure it out for you put it to Auto for me that's going to put on everything to ultra I still prefer just working with high I find high works just fine for reference I'm using a 64 gigabyte of RAM on a stock 3070 card on a pretty old 4k monitor which is pretty clunky so high medium to high will work just fine if you want to drop any of these down you can drop the anti-aliasing or the Shadows down but it's so nice to be able to see a little bit of how your scene is going to look so a high is just medium to high is a good place to be now in 2023 we also have viewport resolution scaling um basically asking twin motion to work on a low resolution and upscale visually on the monitor I haven't really utilized this enough so I can't really tell you how well this is going to work but I did drop the a path Tracer from 100 to 70 percent and I haven't noticed a huge discernible visual difference so that might be something to keep in mind all right with everything else now we're in a pretty good spot I think we can go ahead and click OK and I'm going to clean up this scene here and then we are going to bounce right up into our model and we'll look at why is our floor see through all right be right back okay so let's uh talk about materials in Twin motion and also address why my floor seems to be see-through okay well first thing to note about twin motion materials you have a variety of different places you can get materials from we can use the material tab up here on the left to access really the materials that come built in to Twin motion and some of these are really really nice glass metal concrete and wood are all in the top left and you probably will utilize these a lot in your projects on top of that they also have some really nice Plastics and some really lovely wall coverings this is going to be things like plaster so let's pop over here and we'll just drag a plaster uh there we go just straight onto these objects now one thing to note when it comes to dragging out materials onto really your objects or your walls or surfaces in Twin motion twin motion does have this little option here at the top to determine how the texture map is actually applied you can use from object UVS but if it doesn't look right you can always try changing that to cubic UVS or you can also try changing it to cylindrical or spherical now in an Ideal World all of our objects would be UV unwrapped that is they would have coordinate system that tells the software how to lay the texture out but that's kind of out of the scope for a lot of people doing architectural visualization that's more of a I think 3D generalist type of thing so for our purposes if you run into a situation for example here let's play let's put some brick for example don't know why you would but Jackson Break onto this object here and you're getting some kind of weird seams going on or the material just isn't applying correctly you can go ahead and change this to spherical and we'll try dragging out another one and just see how that looks in this case kind of worse let's try cylindrical a little bit better you're still getting some stretching going on but either way just be mindful of that that if the object doesn't really have UVS you may run into some texture issues now a couple of other things to note about materials and obviously we're going to fix that um the library of materials these are the default ones that come with twin motion you also have access to the mega scans now I'm not going to spend too much time talking about this I think almost everybody involved in any sort of visualization visualization is kind of aware of what the mega scans are but just be mindful you have an array of surfaces where you can get a huge variety of new and different materials some of these are probably unlikely to use like coal you know or you know gravel maybe to some degree but some you will use quite a lot the selection of plaster materials is really really really good and realistically there shouldn't be many use cases where you find yourself stuck for a material the quicksil mega scans library is an incredible asset and it's all available to you through the basically twin motion interface really fantastic stuff so for example you could find a rock here and I'm just going to download this just any of these all you have to do is click the little download icon mileage is going to vary a little bit on that based on your internet speed but once it's downloaded you just drag it onto the surface you want it'll take a second but it will create an object for you and I think it's just incredibly incredibly cool you can really see that if we let's put this on the wall just for example there we go it's as simple as that now the other option is importing manually importing materials and that's kind of a topic for I think another day we should be able to get through on this using just the materials browser here and mega scans all right a couple of other things to note on materials I'm going to just control Z and kind of step back here a little bit and I'm going to look at a wood material for the floor and I'll just talk about the material properties tab on the right I'm going to go to Wood I'm going to grab this really nice chest not Material place it on and again just be mindful how the UVS are set here we'll pop you know very much kind of determine somewhat the scale so if you find your texture you drag it out and it looks like really really big or it's really really small most likely the issue is just how it's being projected on there and hopefully that will help you a little bit of frustration there we go now go and I'm just going to select this hit t on the keyboard bring up the eyedropper and we can sample our floor material here double click and you can see over here on the right now we have options to affect the color we can also use the grunge slider to add effectively sort of procedural dirt um you know very useful on certain surfaces you know really floors in particular um that would pick up gradual wear and tear and oils and things like that let's get to add a little bit of grunge to there we also have options to kind of go in here and load up our own textures and we can adjust things like the overall gamma so the brightness or the gain and lift and you know for this project we're going to probably just leave things pretty simple so just leave things as their default you can use the UV rotation tool to spin the direction effectively think of this as kind of the flow of the object really what way the texture is being sort of projected onto that surface and how you can rotate it can be very useful for doing things like putting wood on walls and if it's flowing the wrong way you might want to rotate it we can also adjust the roughness um I'm not going to go too deep into the woods on like PBR materials but basically all objects have some degree of roughness except for really like the most pristine Metals but even those will have you know grunge or smudge or you know fingerprints or dirt or dust on them so the most part every object is to some degree has a rough surface that's a very Layman's version of PBR materials but you do the ability to go in here and kind of tweak how rough the surface is and this can kind of work concurrently with the grunge as well so you can kind of get a really nice look to your materials you can load up your own roughness Maps if you're not happy with what you're getting but for the most part using the default twin motion materials you can get pretty nice look to your surfaces low roughness is obviously going to be shinier or we should say more reflective it's probably a more accurate way to put it but realistically most surfaces will have a little bit of roughness and a bit of grunge on them objects that are metallic you are going to want to use the metallic slider here to actually make them metallic so let's go over to a metal material and I'm going to grab this slightly worn brass and I'm just going to drag it out onto these urns and you can kind of see here the difference that default material has a metallic slider already cranked up now strictly speaking most materials are not going to be a hundred percent methyl um you know that those kind of pop up to some degree like Chrome materials might be but um scientifically speaking a lot of a lot of the materials that you know you'll really use metal usually has some sort of layer on it whether it's paint or some sort of clear coat or something like that but just be mindful if you're if your materials you know don't look right and they're metallic this slider will crank that it's similar to the metallic slider in lumion as well all right um normals um you know just we're just gonna ignore that and just use the default normal Maps um you know I'm not going to get into explaining normal maps in this video but anyway there you go normals um other things you might want to be aware of emissive materials uh emissive materials is just something that emits light now emissive materials are generally going to be used on things that normally emit light so for example a light bulb or electronic devices or screens anything that will give off any sort of glow you can go in and just turn up the emissiveness you can see here you can also adjust effectively they're calling it a luminance filter but it's really just sort of the color that you want the glow to be where we're probably going to use this in the scene maybe a little bit in these lights and that's about it for this shot I miss it was not going to be a huge big deal for us okay now I mentioned the floor why is my floor see-through well this goes back to normals and not strictly speaking the normal map but a normal is an imaginary line that comes up off the surface that can sometimes really be used to tell a software how something should be rendered so in this case strictly speaking this should have surface thickness but it doesn't how we get around that then is just going down to the miscellaneous Tab and turning on two-sided and this will basically fix our floor so I'm going to select our floor material again hit t on the keyboard bring up the eyedropper and turn on two-sided and there we go all right so if that ever happens do and it does happen I find quite a lot coming from SketchUp especially for surfaces that may not have any particular thickness like well that you may want to turn on the two-sided material it will save you a lot of heartache and a lot of pain trying to figure out why materials were not displaying correctly okay I think that's a pretty good starting point we're gonna go now and start applying materials to our scene and I'm not going to go through every material that we do here I'll pay special attention to the wood material and the plaster on the walls and we'll talk a little bit about glass but I think we're going to bounce forward okay everybody so this is a good time to take stock of where our materials are and just note that even though working in Twin motion is really really nice really a lot of time is going to be spent adding materials and tweaking and changing materials and so just be mindful of that it's um it's a good process but it can take a while depending on the complexity of your scene so in our current shot I've gone ahead and utilized pretty standard wood floor here you can see that when you hit t on the keyboard to bring up the eyedropper tool it is going to effectively bring up this materials palette right here and you can see any of these little icons that has a tick box is a material that is being utilized in your scene you can also select these and delete so if you find one that doesn't for example this one here black metal you can select that and just hit delete and remove it it's nice to be able to keep this panel a little bit cleaner and tidier so we've gone and we've placed um really just some basic wood materials I really like this this is one of the defaults I think it's Ash floor materials in Lumia looks nice we've put a white Plaster on the walls and we went ahead and added a sort of teal colored this is a mega scan teal material that we downloaded you can see the mapping isn't perfect and if we kind of hit or on the keyboard let's bring up The Path tracer you can see it looks okay it's not perfect but it'll do from distance all right we've also added a sort of thicker more worn plaster to the decorative pot here and in terms of glass materials I'm using a standard glass material here let's go to our library click on materials glass so for the exterior glass we're just using clear glass I'm going to apply that to both sections there we go if you see something like this where there's a bit of a light discrepancy probably means that maybe there's a double-sided plane in SketchUp so it might be worth popping back to figure out where the lighting difference is coming from I'm just using clear glass and I'm not really going to change any of the settings for that for the mirror I'm really just using the mirror material just drag it straight on hit or on the keyboard and you can see beautifully done path tracing mirror Reflections looks really really nice okay for this object over here which is going to be our bedside lamp I do have a two-sided glass on this now I may change that if we decide to put a light in there and see how that functions but right now it is just purely decorative um I've also added a couple more pieces of plaster and this is Omega scans kind of dark wood material big takeaway just make sure that the materials are hopefully scaled correctly and that you have them set to two-sided so now that we have our materials done let's take a kind of critical look at where we are you'll notice one or two differences though I did go ahead and change out the large decorative pot and the bed now the reason for both of this these two changes was simple quite simply when it comes to objects from the SketchUp Warehouse you don't leave any control over how well they're constructed or how the UVS are potentially laid out or in these cases not laid out if you're finding that when you assign textures to those objects that no matter what you do the textures are always problematic then it's probably a good time to just scrap those models and move on now thankfully we found a very lightweight model for the decorative vase here and in terms of the bed we have a wonderful model from imesh and I've talked about them before and I'll link out to them again these are models that are of an incredibly high quality for blender and you can load them up export them out from blender as an fbx and assign your own textures and materials to them in Twin motion now with that being said let's go and add one or two more decorative elements and to do that we're going to go over here to our sort of decorative stand that we have I'm going to go to the objects tab and we're going to go into the home and really this is just a case of finding things that you like the look of and seeing what works for you so we can go in and we can find decorative plants maybe just grab something here that we can just kind of plop into the scene it doesn't have to be overwhelming we don't need something that's going to be really distracting you just want stuff that will go nicely with what you have in the scene so let's do something like I know we're building kind of a interior shot here but it can be nice to just add small little things that really just kind of help sell the scene a little bit they don't have to be major and they don't have to be very distracting but you do just want to add little things small little things that make your scene look lived in or inhabited it's part of just telling the story of your scene to set up our ambience I'm going to go up here to the right where it says Ambience I'm going to move myself out of the way all right and we are going to use a hdri environment so you can see under the avian Sab we've got really options for the environment the camera render and FX if we wanted to change the overall look we're just concerned with the environment right now and it is really great that in this version of twin motion really all of the lighting is under just one Ambience Tab and I think that's really good move kind of streamlines the process okay so let's do this we can ignore Global lighting and all that for now I'm going to scroll on down to hcri environment and I am going for a a bright sort of environment I don't want to spend too much time looking outside or seeing what's outside but we do want that nice light now click the enabled button and then I'm going to go down to the HRI preview we are going to use a Sky Dome um I think the sky dome is literally a dome that wraps around the scene and the backdrop hcri is effectively almost a flat plane and I'm going to go for the the Sky Dome and so I'm gonna click right here and go go to library all right over here on the left it'll bring up this library for hdri environments so skies and we've got indoor and outdoor and some for Studio if you're doing product shots let's just go to skies and I'm gonna go for just a noon and clear and I just want something that's kind of just going to be generically bright we want the focus to really just be on the interior so let's let's grab this noon clear 03 I'm going to click this and download I'm going to left click and just drag it into the scene okay and there it is it does take a little bit of time to download and load up but that looks pretty nice let's do a quick path Tracer test I'm going to put the path Tracer back to low we know that low is going to be very much a preview mode here but it'll give us an idea of how things are looking okay pretty dark so what do we do about that well there's a couple of things that need to be adjusted here to get this to work I'm going back to the hdri environment Tab and you can see the intensity right now is just one let's go ahead and crank that quite a lot put that up to 10 or close enough to 10 maybe and we'll just see where 10 is at that'll work and again hit or to access the low quality preview all right very nice very bright and I'm going to spin the HRI preview so turn off the basically turn off the path eraser and just spin this I'm trying to get light to really come in these windows now bearing in mind I have a wall back here but it'll probably will be put back so no light should be coming really from that spot we want as much light as possible coming in from just our hdri environment we look at the settings down here you can see HRI effects lighting yes we do want that on we don't want this to act as just a pseudo background and we do want to lock this on to the hdri as well and that means that you know really as we spin this we're looking for light to be falling through the glass and coming in to our actual room I'm going to tweak this and get this right and if we have to change the hdri preview to do that and try a different Sky we can totally do that as well okay everyone so I did end up changing out our hdri just to find something that really hit the Sun a little bit lower on the horizon again just easy enough to do but you can see I've gone ahead and put the intensity at nine and you can see it's a low Sun clear one that's pretty nice if you're having difficulty getting the HRI to work exactly right just pull your camera out completely and what you're looking for is to track the sun you can see we can spin that with the rotation slider here and in my case really going for something where the sun is blasting kind of light through the windows now pop back inside and I'm going to hit the path tracer okay and you can see even on just the low settings that is pumping a lot of nice light into the shot let's go and we'll put this on medium to give us a better idea of how it'll look yeah that just looks so very very nice I think you're in a pretty good spot in order to get a little bit more soft light in the scene I'm gonna add another light go to the lights on the left here and I'm going to grab an area light you can see when I do this it's effectively a big giant Square this is a square that's going to drop light into my seam and I'll place it right here on the bed then I want to select it and just lift it right up and try and get it where it's nice and snug with the ceiling and in order to actually see what I'm doing here so I can really see I'm going to go back to my Ambience and I'm going to turn off the Sky Dome pretty much turning off the intensity now the only light in here should be this basically area light that we just put in now you can kind of see that this light is doing a pretty good job just kind of pumping generic white light into the scene not too shabby at all it's probably a little bit much and so I can go to my scene tree here on the right select it and you can see I have options here now for the intensity so if we Crank that up hit or you can see what it's doing out that's a lot and we can also adjust the length width and attenuation is going to be the fall off so where it stops generally I kind of like this to actually kind of go through the floor a little bit and you don't want it to just stop in a kind of arbitrary point so I'm just trying to add just this kind of soft light in there all right looks nice and we'll drop the intensity back so no light and just slowly adding in a little bit more okay looks pretty nice now we can also go to the shadows and if we want we can turn those on and again you can see the effect that's having for now though I'm pretty happy just pumping light into the scene I think this light here combined with our actual environment light is going to look pretty nice welcome back everybody and if you've made it to this part of the video thank you so much for watching really do appreciate it and I hope you're finding the content useful and hopefully learning something new moving forward I have done and dropped a reflection probe in to the scene so if you're not aware go to the library Tab and go to tools and reflection probes I use the Box reflection probe I'm going to place it right in here generally this was part of the course if you were not using the path Tracer in the older versions of twin motion using it here I can't say conclusively or definitively if it's going to affect a lot of the path Tracer sort of render results but my understanding is traditionally a box reflection probe effectively limits the reflection radius so in other words in reflective surfaces you're not getting like the sky reflected in those it kind of limits the reflections to a kind of small box area now go ahead and just drop one right in here and you can see now if I can just click on this one here we do have options for size we can make it larger and we can adjust the brightness and sort of the transition our code off value generally speaking for square rooms you are going to want to use a square reflection probe and I'm going to place mine just right here on the floor there we go nice it looks pretty nice that'll work just fine and I'm using the default size now I have also made a few little changes here we did close out the back wall just generic white wall just to have something there so you're not getting the sky reflected in I also added one or two more decorative elements and did fix up really the plaster material on these two objects now this is only to be mindful of a lot of times if you're going from SketchUp to Twin motion your objects are not going to be UV unwrapped and so textures can really be sort of projected on my twin Motion in a really ugly fashion now I might do a separate thing on that it's really awkward and difficult working with UVS in SketchUp but there are a couple of like cheap workarounds and there is a full um I think 69 UV unwrapping tool available for SketchUp I haven't tried it but um there's a there's another few workarounds I also added a second aerial light just at the back can't really see it here but you can see if I toggle it on and off it'll just add a bit more light and that was just to soften the Shadows from the area light pointing downwards I've also got a little bit of an empty area here so let's add in something from the mega scans Library I moved this decorative element a little bit closer so it's in the shot but we still have effectively a dead area in the scene now empty spaces is not a problem especially for this kind of look this sort of like white and brown kind of look you can get away with uh some quite empty areas Corners we do kind of want to fill in the corners as best we can so let's go ahead and grab something from the mega scans Library you know Mega scans over here on the left and again we are for beginners we are in the library tab so Mega scans and I'm going to go to 3D assets here's where you can go in and search so I'm going to go search and I'm going to such as pot all right you can see we've got some nice little planter objects let's download this guy here like the look of this you can see there'll be a brief download period select it and you'll have the ability to just drop it or plop is a better way to think of it just kind of plop it into your scene there we go now once we have it we can select it we can hit eight on our keypad or go to 9 for the scale you know just left click and drag lift that up I'm going to take this up here on sort of the vertical or the blue axis okay that looks kind of nice very consistent with the look and feel of our other decorative elements let's put in something now that will act as a layer off kind of soil and then we'll put some Greenery on top all right let's do that next again just sort of place it into my scene and it's very very large right now but we can scale it down and keep going keep going make it about the dimensions of the pot hit seven on the keyboard to switch to the lift or sort of move Gizmo and I'm going to lift this up there's our old friend autosave kicking in and I'm gonna move this to here now it doesn't have to be completely perfectly in there just enough you know we can get a nice layer of soil the cool thing about this is we can go back to the mega scans we can go back to surfaces and I'm just going to look for ground try this Tundra wild grass just take a look and see if this works really just needs something brown that will work and drag this on there we go that's not too bad now the scale may be a little bit off but all in all that will work fine especially with our camera back here now go back to the mega scans and we're going to go to 3D plants I'm just going to find something like I do like some of these herbs so let's just pick something here over on the left I've already used lemon balm which I think looks really really nice if we get the path tracer yeah very very nice and over here let's just do something simple or maybe something a little bit more Vivid um we are going for kind of white kind of color scheme so maybe we can see if there's something that will look nice and let's try this hydrangea maybe and just see okay download it and once we download it we will be given the option to make some variations some 3D variations all right go ahead and click the variation button you can see uh tune motion will create some I believe they're sort of procedurally generated variations and I'm going to click here now we've got our variations I'm going to just click on one and once this loads in you can see it's just populated this into the scene we can now just place this into the pot just like that and maybe just crash it down a little bit so it doesn't look like it's floating but all in all I think that's a pretty nice looking edition if we wanted we could try some different variations but just know that downloading these and making these variations does take quite a bit of time all right that looks pretty good let's move on to set up our camera really quickly I'm pretty happy with the overall look of this under the media tab we have options for our images we can set up video and we can do things like panoramas and so forth now we're not going to do any of that we're just going to do a bunch of images so I'm going to click here to create my first image that looks nice and the first shot I think is going to be something along the lines of just a straight on camera shot now obviously the focal length and all that looks a little off but right now that looks good go down here and hit the refresh button and I'm going to move myself out of the way here and let's click on the ambience make sure we're in a good spot with that okay now we'll have options here for setting everything up but what we're more concerned with is not the environment because our hdri is going to act as the environment but the camera tab all right by default there's not a huge amount here we've got a focal length and some other random things uh let's go look at the focal length first I'm going to change this from 18 millimeters to about 30. generally kind of for interiors you want to put this up a little bit higher you can kind of see here if I just even if I just dial this the effect that the focal length is actually going to have generally what I recommend to my students for interiors is to put the focal length really at minimum kind of 25 but I'll usually happily go up to 32 or 35 at least just depends on what you're trying to get in the shot you'll notice that the higher focal lengths just also have a more sort of naturalistic response they don't look really as distorted this is not you know 15 millimeters is not I think a very normal sort of way to perceive uh flat images for us I just think that looks really distorted now that will look fine for exteriors but for the interior uh my own suggestion for this would be let's go ahead and just put a two maybe 30 or 32 and I can move the camera back physically the focal length is not affecting the actual position of the camera more or less just the sort of kind of visual Distortion that you get all right I think that looks pretty good I'm going to go back to image one and just hit refresh any of these changes that I make I do want to make sure that I hit the refresh button here I want to effectively bake in those changes specific to image one yeah we'll come back to depth of field a little bit before we go out camera effects I I'm really not going to mess with a huge amount of these vignetting the default is nice so if you're not sure a vignette is going to darken the edges it's a nice visual way of sort of recreating what you used to get with old cameras particularly manual cameras it does help Focus the viewers attention generally on what you want them to be looking at but really you know 40 is fine leave without the default if you want any more it's really easy to do it in Photoshop lens flare um very much not a fan of this I think it's it's sort of done to death so we're going to just leave that on nothing now the parallelism is a bit of a mouthful but it what it will do is basically straighten the vertical lines can also be done in Photoshop but it's better to go ahead and just click that on again just refreshing right here we don't need the near clipping plane because our camera is not being blocked by anything but if we doing a shot like this and we kind of did want to get rid of maybe one of the objects in front we could actually just crank that and it will actually you can see carve away the objects very useful for carving away walls as well one other thing that's kind of cool the availability of these composition overlays so you can see on the bottom right here I'm going to turn on the grid you can see what we have here is a really nice basically rule of thirds and the whole kind of Crux of this is really just these focal points there are these kind of Four Points where you sort of want to use them as really the think of them as like the meeting action points for your image so it's a nice balanced form of composition and so I'm going to just use it here a little bit just to kind of picture get these kind of lined up a little bit better and then again just hit refresh now you can adjust these you can add more and you can have it where it's just you know single lines but rule of thirds is really nice and might be familiar to you if especially if you're coming from for example lumion where just holding the right Mouse button will activate that in the viewport mode now or the render preview mode all right that looks pretty nice I'm gonna go back and put that back to none okay so the camera effects we're all looking pretty good we're pretty happy now depth of field I am going to enable this and you can see everything goes Super Duper blurry now I'm gonna pick my focus point so I'm going to click on this and I'm going to put that right on the bed here and I'm going to leave the aperture and these guys here just just leave them to default now one thing I will point out true emotions depth of field seems to have kind of changed a few times it can be really really strong so just be mindful of that there is a possibility that you'll find the depth of field is just too much and maybe you want to dial it off I'm going to hit or on the keyboard and just take a quick look at this yeah there we go looking pretty nice all right I like that go ahead and set up our five shots so we've got image one image 2 right here which I think I kind of really like this one a lot and then we've got a fun little one where I'm almost inside in effectively kind of in the decorative element here and I've got four and five closer up on the bed now you can batch export these but I'm gonna just do them sort of manually one at a time so I can make any tweaks or changes that I need to one thing to note as well you are currently in Media mode so if you do want to make sort of global changes go ahead and hit quit Media mode the second thing to note is if you're having a hard time setting up your camera one thing to be mindful of is the numpad or sort of numbers above the um Quality so numbers one two three four and five can be used to determine the speed of your camera generally I found three and four to be good for nipping around the scene but when it comes time to actually set up your camera just go ahead and maybe hit number two on on the keypad and also the camera really substantially down and hitting one will make it even slower so you can really fine tune your shot now the other thing to note is the outside pretty happy with the look of really this 4K picture that we have of the trees I'm getting a lot of this starting ground and what I really kind of want to do is just change that so I'm actually going to go over here to materials and we're not going to use any sort of 3D grass we're just going to find a ground material and I'll find you know maybe something a little bit Browner that might work really just something that will look okay from distance so maybe try grass four and you can drag that directly out which is kind of cool you're just applying this material directly to the ground the starting ground plane which is really really nice all right that showed all in all look pretty good especially with the depth of field on where we're not hopefully seeing too much detail out there now we might also want to try adding a little bit of foliage as well maybe just add some sort of trees to the outer section so for that we can just go to the vegetation Tab and I'm going to scroll forward here again just hit three or four on the keypad and just zoom in forward and I'm going to you can see the outside of my building here let's go trees and I just want to find something that uh kind of fits maybe geographically that won't look too far out of place I'm going to place them just a little bit randomly that's pretty much our render setting set off there's not much else that I want to or need to tweak so let's go ahead and render these out all right everyone just two more little things that I actually want to reference uh before we hit the giant render button so the first is FX and image here now FX is you know it's going to be color grading basic color grading my kind of suggestion would we don't bother with it do it in Photoshop you just have more controls more options now image over here is important though because this is where we pick the size of our rendered output images now I'm going to click output size here and by default it's set to about 2k which you know when I first started in 3D like 2K was still a little kind of a big image size um but I'm going to put this to 4K and you will want to do this I believe for each image uh sort of separately unless I'm mistaken on that but you just want to make sure that it is set to basically 4K for each one that should be pretty much it after that go to the export Tab and for example I'm going to set up this one right here image four its output size is 4K then go to the bottom of the screen go to export I'm going to click on that click on image and you can pick jpeg PNG exr um we're just going to do jpeg it's fine all right jpeg I'm going to leave just the refinement off yeah you can see what it hovers over there and just increases the range of uh basically the viewport for Reflections not really going to make a big difference for us I think that's I'm pretty happy with that let's let's go ahead and just pick the images that we want so and click on image here I'm going to start image 4 just because I like the look of this one probably probably my favorite you do have the options to turn on or off real time this is governed I believe by whether you have the real-time button pressed on each of these images so you can see that little kind of dotted Square in the top left corner that is going to determine it so but for our purpose since I'm doing this one at a time you click on just image four and I think that's it we can go ahead and scroll down here and just do start export one thing I will point out before I do this though is the path Tracer this is sort of a curious little thing if you hit the path Tracer you'll notice that is the area light that we put on the ceiling Now it only appears interestingly in the reflection so in other words in the mirror it shouldn't not really sure why it is doing that but we will have to hide it for at least this image so just be mindful of that you may not think this matters that much but for example if you're one of those people who puts area lights outside there are windows to blast additional light into the scene this is just a chance that it may become visible it's possible that I've missed the setting too maybe there's a turn off and Reflections tab or a button somewhere but um just something that you might want to be mindful of it'd be a shame to do a full you know 4K or 6K or AK render only to find you're seeing some weird Reflections in your mirror especially for those of you who do a lot of bathroom Interiors or kitchen Interiors you kind of use area lights a lot in those so just something mindful of okay I'm gonna go ahead and leave it there I'll see you in all of these images are done all right welcome back everybody so we've gone ahead and finished up our renders and I want to go over um just a few kind of issues that I ran into I think there's a tendency when people are making tutorials online to really kind of skip over or gloss over where things go wrong or the issues that they run into and instead they just you know show you something really nice and shiny and say look how awesome I am um but in reality you are going to run into issues so let's take a look at some of the issues that I ran into that were kind of chopped from the video so you guys didn't have to watch me figure them out and see some of the changes that were made the first issue that we ran into is the lack of UVS and what this means is again without going too deep into the rabbit hole of what UVS are for 3D practitioners um it's the ability to effectively tell the software how the textures should be assigned now there is a quick workaround that we can do here we have a generic pot it's just a standard pot model that I downloaded from someone in the warehouse and if your textures are not applying to it correctly there is an extension you can get from the warehouse called sketch UV it's this one right here in the top left corner and what we can do is go into our group and I'm just going to select this face right here I'm going to go up to the sketch UV button I'm going to click on it and I'll right click on the model and go let's do a cylindrical map from View all right and you can see now this is um this texture map that you're looking at should be familiar to anyone who's kind of done anything in 3D so say UV texture map to see how the UVS are actually laid out but by double clicking on it we can go into like the orthographic mode right click and go cylindrical map from View and you can see it'll kind of straighten the edges this is not ideal but SketchUp natively does not and really intentionally hides all the UV information from you um you know you could also maybe send an object like this over to blender or 3D Studio Max but if you've got access to blender or 3D Studio Max you're probably going to be using them anyway and they have UV tools built in so this is just a quick and dirty way to do this it is not perfect and you know if we go up here and look at the top I can try the same technique again double click on just the surface here go to the sketch uvuv mapping tool left click on that icon right click and go cylindrical map from View and you can see it doesn't work very well so we can also try spherical maps and that works a little bit better it's really just up to how the plugin kind of kind of determines the surface and you can try the different mapping tools you can use the tool here to create seams which again I'm not going to go over this but it's not perfect and the more complicated your object is more problematic it is this is partially due to the fact that twin motion does not feature a triplanar mapping option yet and I don't really know why the second issue that we ran into is really the section outside this window I had intended for kind of this shot to be my primary shot but sort of ran into issues more specifically with this seam right here you can see the edge of the plane that we brought in and below below that we had this ground plane but the problem was it just didn't look good in the renders it looked like a really obvious Gap and even with depth of field turned on it just looked too pronounced I even went ahead and placed a lot of grass models down here and that didn't really help because quite simply they didn't show up fully in the render and so what I ended up doing was moving the trees further towards the window so in other words these trees were now right outside the window and it does work it does impact light overall but it looks a little bit better and it was kind of an annoyance um some of these are minor problems you can kind of spot them if you do much smaller sort of Messier test renders and you really kind of should do that and the third issue was this render shop it just didn't work it just looked bad and you know that happens too you can set up cameras and be like this will be the coolest shot ever and it's not um and so that was kind of the major issues the fourth issue though is a big one and I think it is important to mention and it's something I hadn't realized area lights light the ones that we had at the top of the screen they will show up in Reflections if you use the path Tracer it's a little bit strange and it seems to have been a known issue for a little bit of time right now at least going back since the path to tracer was introduced and it doesn't seem to be fixed and I'm not really sure why but all in all you can see it right up there in the top of the screen that is the area light being reflected in the path Tracer it is also reflected in the glass on the windows so just keep that in mind it's um it's kind of something to be mindful if you're building areas like really bathrooms for example that you're going to be shoving an awful lot of artificial lights in they are going to appear and right now to the best of my knowledge there is no wide and Reflections button which is something that D5 does feature a hide in Reflections uh button for lights so there you have it those are the issues I ran into let's bounce into Photoshop we'll do some quick and messy kind of post-production and just kind of see if we like the end result all right see you in a bit all right everyone back in Photoshop so I'm gonna work on this image first and I have gone ahead and grabbed the actions tab here so that's available under window and actions and hopefully we can record all of the changes we make to this image and then just run that action on top of other images so I have made sure that this is off of button mode you can see by default I think it's in button mode so click the little icon here turn off button mode and I'm going to click on post and I'm going to click new and I'm just going to call it action two is fine I'm going to change the color to Green so we can see it and I'm going to hit record this should record everything that we do with our Photoshop image here and will allow us to basically play back those steps on other images all right so right click duplicate layer click OK and I'm going to do just a quick levels adjustment and I'll just drag that over here just click Auto there we go nice and bright that looks good and right click and merge it down right click duplicate the layer one more time we're going to fly all the way up here to filter and we'll go camera raw filter which is where I do like most of my stuff and here we go now really what I'm looking for is I like the overall color scheme here I just want to bring out all the texture so it's kind of basic and I'm pretty happy with the exposure and all of that let's see about just adjusting the highlights you bring up the whites a little bit so the whites on the highlights will take up and I do want to darken the Shadows a little bit I don't want to be super dark but just a little Dash and then we can adjust the blacks as well all right now the main focus here is going to be on the texture so I'm going to zoom in a little bit here on let's put this back to there we go hit the space bar to move around and this is what I'm looking at right here I'm going to grab the texture slider move that up quite a bit and take the clarity up as well and you can see the difference here when you crank that it looks really dramatic and really nice and then lastly the dehaze normally we kind of can strip the way some of the Haze by moving it to the left I do if you want to bring this back I'm going to zoom out and just see the effect that this has had on my image okay it looks pretty good I lighten some of the Shadows again you can see look at that really nice detail that we brought back in I am going to crank the Vibrance make these colors look a little bit more vibrant and take down the saturation a little bit so it looks a little less sort of CG that sort of kind of plasticky look and kind of see if we crank it to the right what I mean overly saturated so bring that back a little bit to the left all right looks good click on my curves I may adjust really kind of not too much that I want to adjust here we can always take up the mid tones a little bit and the highlights might be a little too bright right now so bring them down a little Dash I'm just going to grab the detail cider here and I'm just going to sharpen this a little bit more all right looks pretty good color mixture I'm okay with the color overall we can move the oranges and affect the brown a little bit I do want to bring some of that back uh just kind of bring back some of the wood colors a little bit and we can just kind of tweak these sliders just a little all right I think I'm happy with that uh color grading I generally ignore um you know chromatic aberration and I might leave it off for this one geometry and effects I do want to add some grain I want to make this a little bit more noisy so I'm going to take that up to about half and the vignetting that we had kind of before I am going to add the slightest amount of that back in and the overall calibration I'm I'm pretty happy with where everything is at looking at the top right corner of the overall histogram things are kind of balanced things are kind of looking okay overall we can adjust the exposure just a little bit more but that might be too much just a little Dash we do have some pretty pronounced um the whites there so I'm just going to right click on the histogram itself and just drag it to the left and you can see you get quite a lot of control in just by moving the histogram it's pretty nice yeah all right there's a nice balance and grab those darks and bring them back into the fold a little bit just a little to the right I think that looks really really nice let's click OK and in a second we'll see if this has actually worked all right let's pause all right so I'm back over on this image my you know really I kind of like these images the most and I'm over here on my actions tab and I'm going to click on action 2 and I'm going to hit play and there you go it runs through the entire changes that we've made it also because we duplicated our layers gives us a nice duplicate over here I do find that on this image in particular those changes particularly the noise probably a little too strong but because it's on its own layer go ahead and just drag that down and there we go I think all in all that looks pretty nice I could always go back here and you know kind of change this to your heart's content but I really like the look of both of these images the overall feeling of texture and the lights and darks and I think it looks pretty nice all right um with that being said I am going to go ahead and leave it there thank you so much for watching and if you found the content useful or the instruction go feel free to leave a comment or to like or subscribe those things um as annoying it is as it is to kind of hear people constantly saying like And subscribe um really does actually help with the channel so thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next video cheers [Music]

Channel: ViaRender

Views: 2,695

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Id: pqf52ou1Lm8

Length: 67min 49sec (4069 seconds)

Published: Mon May 29 2023