Twinmotion Interior Lighting Guide for Beginners

hi everybody in this video render video we want to take a look at interior lighting within twin motion this is a topic that I think there's a lot of interest in but for particularly for beginners there's not a lot of guides on how to go about setting it up and more specifically what to do if you find yourself in a situation that's different to a scene that you've used previously in this tutorial this beginner friendly tutorial we'll take a look at four different scenes and I'll talk about how I would go about lighting them we'll take a look at the lighting setups that I use and I'll take a look at the path Tracer and results foreign so here we are in the first of the scenes that we're going to look at this is intended as a pretty straightforward standard daytime Dusk and then sort of evening shot so we'll look at three variations on lighting setup for this one scene and you can see it's a pretty nice setup it's a very basic build a lot of this just came from SketchUp and so we've got a nice room with some furniture and some decorative elements okay now for the setup for this render I'm just going to try and do this without using artificial lights and let's look at the first way to light your scene I'm going to move myself out of the way and a couple of things to note about this we are using the path Tracer in Twin motion 2023 uh 0.1.2 it's a little bit slower I've noticed than some of the other versions of twin motion's path Chaser I really think it's a little bit of a work in progress but let's just look at our lighting setup so in this our first daytime shot with no lights what we have is a couple of things keep sort of in mind the first is the exposure tab right here this will pop up quite a bit in all of the renders that we do for now I'm going to leave it at the default one and I'm just going to leave Auto exposure on please note as well that this section right here deactivates if you use the path Tracer except for the ambient Tab and the white balance now I should note the ambient tab is supposed to work with the path Tracer although I did a number of test renders with the ambient tab set to Warner and five and didn't really see any difference but officially it is supposed to work with a path tracer so we can ignore those for now no other than that we are going to light our scene with the hdri environment and I'm using it enabled and it's set to Sky Dome and because we're just using ambient hdri light for this scene I've picked this noon clear environment now the important thing to note about this type of lighting if you're not using artificial lights and you want to get most of the light coming in from the environment you will have to dial up the intensity in this case I've put this all the way up to 20 and use the rotation to get light coming through the window other than that we've rendered all of these images at a consistent 4K and we are using the path Tracer and again I'm using the twin motion 20 23.1.2 and the path Tracer settings are set to high now I have in my viewport turn the quality down very very very low just so that it works and so it doesn't really kind of completely override everything uh on the screen but this is what we're using samples 150 Max bounces 10. all right with that being said that is how you would set up a very default lighting environment using just the ambient light what's most important let's go to the media tab click on daytime no lights and you can see the path Tracer is going to just run through how this will actually look alright and to my mind it looks pretty good again by default I should have been able to adjust the ambient which would have really sort of put light into the shadowed areas but I think all in all just by lighting your scene using the hdri and the pass Tracer you can get a pretty nice result I think that looks pretty good using just those settings let's move on and look at an overcast last scene and then we'll also look at an evening scene for this same shot okay moving on to look at a sort of evening or dusk scenario we're not quite at doing a night shot just yet but let's look at how we would do anything shot and there's a couple of reasons you might want to do this one the lighting is just a little bit softer and the image is a lot more visually appealing it's not as cool looking in terms of blue values but it's a lot warmer and the image is a lot softer also please be mindful what you see in the viewport is uh very heavily reduced I have to drop the quality into in motion really far down if you have the record at the same time but the overall end results I think are quite nice I'll move myself out of the way here again and we're in our overcast so to set up an overcast shot naturally we're going to go back to the ambience tab again we will be using the path tracer on high settings and I have made just a few little changes here the exposure has stayed the same and auto exposure is on again you can definitely turn this off but for these type of shots you may find it easier now I did crank the ambience to five but again not quite convinced that it is actually doing anything in this version of twin motion next is to find a suitable hdri environment I have ensured that it is a Sky Dome and instead of putting the intensity at really you know 20 like we did before this has been dropped down to five so let's look outside it's a little bright out there but all in all you're still getting a lot of the coloring from this HRI sky is coming through now I've also then made a few little changes let's turn off the path Tracer and just look at these lights right here now these materials have been changed from glass to go up to the materials Tab and just go to we're looking for basically the neon materials so neon and neon one or neon two I'm not sure there's a huge amount of difference I think I use neon one just drag it out but because it's a dusk or evening shot I don't necessarily want these to be very emissive so I have selected these materials and dropped the intensity down in the nighttime shot it would be fine to leave these quite bright because you know they would be one of the main sources of light but because we're in the evening time they shouldn't be overpowering the other lights in your scene so to put them at quite a low setting in addition I have added in some other lights as well at the very top of our scene I have placed a spotlight I've made sure to turn the spotlight on the intensity is set to about 4 000 Lumen I believe generally light bulbs in a ceiling for most rooms are I think around the three to four thousand lumens the main thing here is also the attenuation I'm trying to get this so that the light is casting Shadows you don't want the attenuation or the stop off to be really low you can see it's only like this area I need to make sure that the light is traveling far enough to add some shadows and you can see that under the bed this is the sort of main Light Within the actual scene now other than that we have also added an aerial light you can see the Airy light is this big Square light that's sitting outside now some users will actually move the area lights and have it right up against the window but as far as I know in Twin motion there's no real way to see through that light so what you'll see is just a wall of white light and I didn't really want that so place the area light be square light outside the window but move it far away turn it on and you're gonna dial up and down the intensity as much as you want but what matters is the attenuation again attenuation is the fall off and you can see if I move this you can kind of see in the viewport how it extends how far that light is going so I put the attenuation all the way to the max 328 feet and so the light itself the light source is far back but it is shooting that light straight forward and through the window now in addition I also have two omnidirectional lights set up here now there might be a temptation to put these on and to turn on Shadows which is technically speaking more accurate but for our purposes I've left them off and I think you probably should too as well so we've got glowing lights here a omnidirectional which is going to shoot light in 360 degrees and around your scene but I don't have shadows on and if we actually look at the settings for both of these they're set to a color temperature of 4500 Kelvin it's a little bit warm so it replicates a lamp they're shooting at a very low intensity and the attenuation is pretty low really they're just adding light to this area right here combine all of these things especially the area light pumping light on the outside and you can see now how things are going to look and I think overall this looks quite nice you're not relying as much on this ambient light this basically the hdri the overcast hdri but all in all I think that's a pretty nice result you could definitely dial down the hdri environment if you wanted this to be a little darker over here but overall I'm pretty happy with the look and feel and please know we're not trying to you know show anything outside here I'm not really too pushed about what's going on out here I just want to kind of focus on this area ideally you would hide this with uh really curtains or some sort of fabric and kind of maybe if you can't even hide the windows full stop but that's how I would go about lighting up a dusk scene in Twin motion let's take a look really quickly at the end results and then we'll talk about really a very very dark but not quite night scene next foreign okay everybody the last of the three variants that we look at for this particular scene is going to be this a kind of nighttime shot now it's almost the same as the dusk but if we look up here on the top right obviously we've turned off the area like that was outside because we don't want really a square light blasting light in now I've also picked a low Sun overcast hdri let's quit the media mode here you can kind of if I go back to this really quickly and turn off the path tracing very very dark sky I would strongly recommend for night shots that you don't actually grab a kind of nighttime you know like polyhaven style uh hdri you know really the odds of you doing a shot where it's completely completely black outside is very very kind of limited I would imagine there's still ambient lights in the in the kind of the night sky that you can kind of use a little bit and here we're still using a low Sun overcast hdri but I have dropped the intensity really really low if you can possibly avoid doing a pitch black nighttime shot I strongly recommend that you you do so here we are in our very much our darker evening setting and again I know you can see kind of the environment through here I'm not hugely pushed about that I I you know it's just whatever that's not the point of this now yeah lighting this scene we've got our two omnidirectionals set to the exact same this is nice lamp lighting I think it'll work so it's an omnidirectional low intensity low attenuation Shadows off a little bit warm that will work nice now we have our Spotlight in here and I did crank up the intensity I think a little bit on this Spotlight and you'll notice as well the cone angle for this spotlights in a lot of 3D programs are usually IES light profiles but they're very specific but realistically a light bulb in really trying to light up your your ceiling light is for the most part going to be shooting in a very wide cone a wide angled range basically and so I've taken that up and you can see we're getting some lovely Shadows because of that and again let's just pop back here and then the attenuation is just enough to kind of Hit the Floor really you don't need this light going through but you certainly don't want detail attenuation of that Spotlight to stop halfway into the room now overall it's it's pretty dark there is one extra light that I've added and that is this fella right here it's an area light so a big Square light up at the top and if I crank the intensity you can see what it's doing it's blasting effectively uh light that's matching really the corners of the room and it's just shooting light downwards it's really set to you know a very just kind of white color temperature and it's not very strong at all so if I go back to it here go back to our area light and if I turn it off you can kind of see what's happening here we need extra light in the scene and yes even though it's a nighttime shot you still want to add a little bit even if it's just a little soft bit of light in to the scene nighttime does not mean pitch black and there there would be other light sources in the room realistically you could have already or light leaking from maybe under the doorway or coming from another room so it's okay to not have the room be completely dark so we've got a pretty low intensity area light here and then the other thing that we have tweaked in this setting is to go back to our environment and we've turned off auto exposure now we were pretty happy leaving Auto exposure on and the other shots but for this one I wanted to turn this off this will give me manual control now I can still come back in here and I can still actually crank up the exposure and overall the color values will kind of stay okay but realistically I'm pretty happy with leaving the exposure at one and turning off auto exposure all right with those being said that should get you through pretty much a kind of very late evening almost into nighttime shot and again the windows here I probably would not leave these open you really do want to cover these with curtains or something similar this way you have complete control over the light in your scene all right hopefully that will help you set up an evening into nighttime shot interior within twin motion let's move on to look at the next project or the next scene and see what we've got foreign we've moved on to the second scene that we're going to look at and as you can see here it is a sort of modern style hotel room and you can tell it's a modern style hotel room because it's got really uh also uncomfortable looking furniture that nobody ever wants to sit on and excessive use of marble anyway I want to look at then lighting a scene like this there are a couple of things that you need to be mindful of so I'm going to quit the media mode and move myself out of the way and here we can just kind of look at the scene with in just the default setup things are a little bit different it's a little bit of a more complicated scene so we're going to have to use a variety of different techniques to light this the first thing is because it's a hotel room there's a good chance that you're going to have to show an outside and so this is an outside scene that I grabbed from the warehouse and I brought it in it is sitting on just a curved plane so if you're going to do this where you have to show an environment please note that the main thing is you have to be mindful of the horizon line the perspectives do need to line up and that's something I see a lot of my students mistake they always just bring in a plane and then they just place it there but they don't check that the horizon or lines of perspective line up so here we have a plane I think this looks like Kuala Lumpur unless I'm not mistaken and it looks really really really nice out there and we have positioned our cameras to hide any strange seams if you're going to use a plane outside it needs to be far enough away and you need to make sure that you're not seeing these areas up here where you can see the plane obviously stops okay so that's something to be mindful of we're gonna do two shots here we're going to do a daytime from two different angles and we'll look at using doing a nighttime shot for the same room just using artificial light and that one will be a lot more challenging okay we also have more variety in lighting sources here up at the top we have an emissive plane you can kind of see that just right here uh inset lighting is kind of a big deal in in hotel rooms and you see it in renders a lot people love cutting like inset lighting into the ceiling um it's a little bit cliche at this point but it can look really really nice to do it in Twin motion you are going to use a neon material and I have put that in here and I've actually put it at quite low intensity let's hit t on the keyboard eyedropper so by default I think the glow value is set to like 75 for these but this should be really low so I think mine was at about 40. it's not going to look good in the viewport but it will look okay when you actually render it in addition we have applied a glow material to these inset lights now one thing to note about this in a daytime shot I would strongly recommend that you don't actually put spotlights in these we will put spotlights in for our nighttime Shopper for the daytime shot just don't there's no really reason for it um and we'll look at that in a second we also have the same emissive material running around this excessively fancy light as well okay what about outside lights well if I scroll down here on my right you'll see we have a couple of additional lights in the scene we have it two area lights that are going to be placed outside now I've got one pointing from this side and one coming in from the left as well this is so that really these area lights we're going to turn on Shadows for them and you can see the light is enabled and shadows is actually turned on if you have an area light outside it and it is pumping light into the scene it should probably have shadows turned on not volumetric Shadows just default shadows and we'll kind of see that when we look at the finished renders but really if I hit just hit or on my keyboard here and again I've got the path Chase reset of very low you can see the shadow under the chair right here you do want this effect light from the outside should cast Shadows in addition I do have a spotlight no thank you for twin motion autosave I do have a spotlight set up right up here it is uh at a pretty low kind of intensity but again the attenuation and Cone angle are very wide it's just pumping light into the scene and I do again have shadows turned on the only reason I really have this light turned on in the first place is just to get Shadows because you want contact Shadows under and so again low light intensity almost non-existent intensity and pretty far attenuation and that will give you contact Shadows on the floor something that you wouldn't really get if you're using just the light from the hdri speaking of the hdri again you do want something nice and bright I have set up for image one I believe my environment is using just a spark standard new hdri light I've spun it so I don't know I don't think the sun is kind of blasting into this through this is just ambient light and the intensity instead of cranking it to 20 I don't necessarily want all this blue light that would come with this hdri I don't necessarily want all of that in the room I'm happy enough to just put it at 10 so we do get ambient light but overall a lot of the light for this shot is going to be coming in from these two area lights outside all right let's pause and take a quick look at the end result of the render foreign so let's look at our hotel room at night now this is definitely a lot more challenging because you don't really get access to really you know some of the techniques that we've already mentioned you can't really put area lights outside windows at night and blast slide in and you don't get access to that really nice hdri lighting so this one is definitely a bit more challenging to set up I'm pretty happy with the results but I Would by no means claim to be a complete twin motion lighting expert but as a beginner sort of tutorial I think this lighting setup will help a lot of you out so the first thing is obviously we don't want light from outside so I did select this plane and I have pretty much just dropped the uh Luminosity we don't really need this you keep it there just in case there's a chance you'll see through the window but you want to drop that Luminosity I did change the outside Sky to one of the darker Skies that comes with twin motion it is kind of just it's night time but it's you know it's probably a little too Starry for our purposes now the other important thing and I'm gonna just move myself back in here the glass we really want to make sure that the actual glass and you can see I've selected this and I think I changed this to sort of a more reflective glass strictly speaking if the outside isn't very bright you and you're inside a room with lights on you're not really going to see through the glass and so I think using reflective glass in this situation works just fine you can also make sure that you have your little uh reflection probes placed in your scene and for if you're new to Twin motion those will be under uh tools and reflection probes and so for an interior shot just drop this nice little square one you can put I think multiples in your scene but I think just just drag one right in there as far as I know these will still limit the reflections even with the path Tracer to really the area within the reflection probe maybe if I'm wrong and that somebody can correct me but that will keep the reflections nice and tight on the Windows all right we've left everything else almost the same except we have now added spotlights so I've placed spotlights and what you can do is Place one hold down uh shift drag out one and make sure it's set to instance now this means that each time you make changes to effectively this first one or really any of them it will transfer those changes to all of the other ones now if you want more control just make it a copy and adjust eat light individually but for this purposes I've made instanced light and I've placed quite a lot of them around the scene anywhere where we have one of these inset lights that's glowing I've placed a spotlight I think you could also do without placing the spotlights the path Tracer is good enough that if the glowing objects are strong enough you can just use them as glowing light sources but I I kind of want these shadows and you can see that over here you do get a nice Spotlight fall off now make sure to not crank these like so high that they're kind of like into the light there should be an area where there's sort of a gap between really you where you see the spotlight on the wall right there so just pull them down a little bit intensity incredibly low attenuation just enough to get contact shadows and then the cone angles is something that you're just gonna have to tweak on an individual basis they shouldn't really I don't think be very very wide like this inset lighting is is primarily intended to shoot downwards and so just kind of tweak that to your heart's content and if you find for example that one of the lights is maybe just affecting the area too much feel free to just move it um you know there's realism up to a point and then there's just a nicer looking image so make tweaks and changes as you see fit now a couple of other things I did add one omnidirectional light now remember we did already have a spotlight hanging out up here just shooting downwards now this Spotlight does have shadows enabled the point of it is to get contact Shadows really on areas like under the bed and where the furniture hits the ground it's not really adding a huge amount of light to the scene very soft 400 lumens not much cone angle pretty wide really we're just using that one that little Spotlight to get some Shadows now the other one is this omnidirectional light and if I turn off these lights you can just see I'm just going to run through all of these and just turn them off we don't need them all right turn off the reflection probes too and just looking at the Omni light here and if we toggle it on and kind of off you can see what it's doing it's a pretty low intensity but it's spreading light out in a 360 degree Arc it is completely in many ways artificial but what we're trying to do is is between this and the spotlight up here try and mimic the effect that you get from the main Light Within the room you're getting the Shadows from one and the overall lighting from the other now it's important that the omnidirectional Light Shadows are turned off if you turn them on you get something like that and that looks really trippy with all being said then everything else is pretty good we can go back to our Ambience and as far as I can remember yeah we left Auto exposure on you could absolutely turn this off and and go in here and manually tweak the exposure but I think with the auto exposure on but controlling the lights I do think you can get a pretty nice result um moving on to the next scene and this is a relatively straightforward lighting setup that I think might be useful for a lot of people in a lot of different scenarios now you can see here it looks pretty bright so let's get out of the media mode and just take a quick look at our room we've got a pretty basic Library style room here reading table on the left large window on the front and we've got some books and decorative elements now we'll actually notice as well that in terms of light source we really just have this big window we have these kind of chandelier lights but since they're not really on we have to find alternative ways to light up our scene now if we go to the ambience I'm going to move myself out of the way again you can see we have exposure set to zero and we're using the auto exposure and if we go to the rendered mode here and just do a quick sort of path Tracer low resolution render let's put it back on low and again I have heavily modified these low settings in fact I've already modified all of the path Tracer settings so you can kind of see it's it's not great we need more light in the scene and so how we fix this is relatively straightforward we can place two area lights so the first one and probably the most important one is going to be the one outside now this one here is going to sit outside of your build and it is going to shoot light forward so it's about equal size as the window and the building itself we do also want light coming through the Triangular window at the top as well it would be strange if light only comes in at the bottom instead so we have light going all the way through through we have the camera or I'm sorry we have the light moved far enough back that we're not getting any sort of blown out highlights and we have the attenuation turned up pretty high the intensity seems really really high at the moment that is really just due to the auto exposure the second light because we were getting some interesting shadows in these areas here and I'm gonna go and let's turn off the ambience just to show everyone what this kind of looks like so go to our environment I'm going to put on the exposure and I'm going to drop it down just down to zero and you can kind of see here there's the light blasting and you can see these Shadows are caused by that the area light outside the window and then the secondary light is just sitting right here it's got a pretty low attenuation of about 10 feet so it's only kind of coming into the back of the room a little bit and the intensity is pretty low it just gets rid of these harsh Shadows right here if you want to add some more light in the scene you could also add a third area light pointing downwards from the top of the ceiling and again that would provide as long as it's set to about 6 000 Kelvin pretty much just a neutral generic sort of white light without adding any Shadows now the area light outside does have shadows enabled the area light on the inside uh it does also have shadows enabled but because the attenuation isn't going very far you're not really seeing a huge amount of that it's a very easy lighting setup and then as long as we go back to the exposure turn off auto exposure because that was kind of blowing out the image a bit too too much and you'll also notice I don't have any sun pointed right into the shot I'm trying to avoid you know having you know lighting the scene using just light rays so we've got you know a hdri sun in there but it's not pointed directly into the building once we've done that we have turned off auto exposure and manually tweaked the exposure to get the level that we want let's go back to our stored camera and I'm going to put the render just on the medium setting again my medium is probably about half of what the standard is and let's just do a quick little test and see how this looks yeah all in all pretty happy with the results of this it's a pretty easy and very straightforward lighting system but I think will work for quite a lot of people in a lot of different scenes yeah now if you've made it to this part in the video thank you so much for watching really do appreciate uh people leaving comments or liking the videos so uh but thank you again for watching so this is probably the most difficult lighting setup at least to my mind interior rooms like these kind of bathrooms that have no lights so you're forced to use an artificial lighting setup in its entirety we cannot rely on some of the tricks that we used to use whether it's maybe cranking up the ambience or adding you know a very bright Skylight or maybe an area light outside a window those won't work here there's another reason that we can't just shove area lights in here and it's to do with how the path Tracer handles mirrors if we hit or on the keyboard for the path Tracer you can see we get a nice reflection however if you decide to add in an area light into this shot what will happen is that light will appear in the mirror and it won't appear in the way you're kind of thinking it'll actually just show up kind of in a sort of inaccurate looking fashion let's add a big area light right here and you can kind of see what's happening in the mirror now if I again hit or on the keyboard go back to the ray tracing and you can see the path Tracer is reading that area light as an object which is not what we want and I think you know that is inherently sort of problematic let's delete that light which I think is this one here so how do we go about fixing this and how do we set up a lighting scenario for an interior without windows now apparently a lot of people do like doing these shots um although some people really like doing interior bathrooms um allegedly I am not one of them and so this was kind of a chore but let's see what we can do first thing let's start with the largest light source every bathroom is going to have at least one primary light source and so what we have here in this case is a ceiling Spotlight it's basically just a spotlight but I have clicked on the options here and renamed it just so I can keep track of it and I recommend that you do that too ceiling light spot this is going to be a very strong light it is going to have a wide attenuation and a wide cone angle in other words this is going to be casting a wide Dome of light and it is going to have shadows now I have set my color temperature for this one to be quite blue this will balance nicely with some of the warmer sort of orange or cream color lights in the scene and should hopefully give a nice result they are sort of as you can see on the Kelvin sort of the color temperature here sort of mutually complementary so that's our main light after that we have adjusted the emissive amount so if I hit t on my keyboard select these I've taken these up to be about 75 so they're they're giving a nice glow effect they are set to a warm light as well and then in addition we have added supplementary lights now I have about yeah about five spotlights give or take in the scene they are also set to Shadows on they're not very strong because you do not want them overpowering the main light in the scene and you can see the cone angle is pretty narrow these also have shadows enabled and that should give you a really nice Dynamic look you kind of do want to avoid a scenario where the image has no Shadows so you're looking for something that has mid-tones which will be kind of just the ambient light the highlights from the main light and then some of the sort of Shadow or darker areas in the shot now we can go to our scene tree up here and turn on just lights and take a look at what else we have this is an area light set to look sort of like dramatic lighting kind of like under cabinet lighting if you will it's going to just Cascade down the wall and it's set to again lighten enabled it is quite strong but I've changed it so that this area light is really thin and about seven feet wide and that'll give you a nice result attenuation didn't really matter too much with this one I just want it running down the wall I think yeah Shadows are off because really this is just sort of you know cool looking lighting we've also added another Spotlight here under the lamp beside the bath and I think again just set to a nice warm color to offset some of the Blues now the last Light we have set up is very akin to what we did in the previous project it's a simple area Light low level intensity set to Blue and with no shadows and the reason we put this in is because this area here was getting really really dark and um especially if you've got Ceramics it's really nice to have as wide a variety of Lights as you can hitting it because if we actually look at the results here yeah it looks really really nice you just really want uh as many of these like highlights as you can possibly get okay uh with that being said let's go ahead and just take a look at the final render for this one and there you have it there is our finished render at least in the viewport path tracing settings again for all of these I've done no post production this is just the lighting environment working with the materials in all of these shots it's really what we're just looking at is the default High path tracer if you've made it to the end of the video thank you again so much for watching the point of this video was to take a look at four different scenes and examine the different lightning setups that you can use hopefully one or two of them will be useful to you going forward and hopefully you'll find that setting up Lighting in your twin motion path Tracer scenes especially for beginners has become easier all right I'm gonna go ahead and leave it there uh cheers oh

Channel: ViaRender

Views: 6,907

Keywords: Twinmotion, Rendering

Id: Au7ewKZeeho

Length: 38min 23sec (2303 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 21 2023