Twinmotion Lake Reflection Render Tutorial

i don't know about you guys but i'm personally sick and tired of boring renders that's why today i want to show you exactly how you can create this beautiful render in no time at all what's going on guys my name is david thomas and welcome back to the channel today we're going to be taking any single project that you might have and transferring it into twin motion twin motion would be the basis of this tutorial if it's something that you have if it's not you can use any rendering software the principles are the same eventually once we export that photo out of twin motion we take it into photoshop and then finally we take it into lightroom now i'm going to explain all of these steps very simply and very easily because this tutorial can be done by almost any level of skill so without further ado let's turn around to these two screens and get started okay so you want to start by opening up whatever project you plan on creating this render with i'm going to start with this realistic project that is an actual project in real life but obviously it doesn't exist on a beautiful floating lake surrounded by the forest to create this render in twin motion we do need to create a fake mountain around it just to really simplify the process if we don't then we're going to be dragging trees up and down like crazy and it just becomes too hard so what i've done here in archicad 24 is use the mesh tool to quickly create just a mountain surrounding the actual house itself so all it is is a mesh brought up and then i've created about five meters of water underneath it it doesn't matter what it is because it will eventually be cropped out so what we need to do is open up twin motion by going twin motion direct link and starting a new project okay so we have twin motion 2020.2 open in front of us and it seems like we're already halfway there twin motion does most of the work for you when you import from archicad or anything else which is great so what we want to start with is the actual contents and the material i'm going to try to run through this tutorial very quickly but also give you as much information as you possibly need to know we can see that the mountains behind us are just big white rocks if we go into our material library come into ground nature and scroll to the bottom you're going to see uh midway through mossy rocks if we throw mossy rocks on top and drag them all the way up to about 10 scale we can see it starts to create an almost mountain-like effect it's not that important because they're going to be absolutely covered with trees very quickly down the bottom what we want to do is change that water from archicad straight to actual water from twin motion so when you start using the c object it doesn't matter what material you use from here you can use a pool the pool too the river the lake the sea it doesn't matter we're going to be photoshopping it out we also want to do a little bit of work on the house to make it easier for ourselves so depending on what kind of render you do you want to make the house still look quite nice so personally this is meant to be a concrete house so we're going to go poured concrete scale it to 3 so we can see that's roughly the size of a concrete panel that would be a very challenging concrete panel nonetheless it's okay this is meant to have some sort of materiality some sort of texture but it doesn't really and the sides of the walls are coming out as well so i'm going to change the size of the walls metal with some brushed aluminium in the dark black color because it's also the window frames i believe and then we're going to change the rest of the building into a dark wood so we're going to rotate at 90 degrees scale rotate 90 degrees and then change the color of that wood directly to black now it's again at the end of the day this is your project you can do whatever you want with it it can be a completely different house it can be a completely different color scheme the concept is still going to work exactly the same we don't really have to touch too much of the rest of the building because it's pretty much set up exactly how i want it what we do want to do is make sure that the glass is reflective so we start getting the nature coming around and reflecting on that glass later on we actually do that in photoshop not in twin motion because twin motion just isn't very good at showing good glass now the next step is creating the trees and the forest that you see in the photo there is a number of ways to do it you can click like a madman with the trees go into trees i'm using this colorado tree for this photo here you can use any tree you'd like again completely up to you so like i said you can click like a madman and go to town or you can go to context vegetation paint and drop that tree in so you can actually paint like a madman now painting these trees on as you can see scatters them quite far away and it doesn't actually make it very forest-like so in this instance i am going to click like a madman i'm going to skip past this bit and show you the completed project of me clicking for like five minutes straight okay and there we have it my finger is very sore but we have a forest surrounding our building now we may need a couple more we need may need to change a few bits and pieces but we're going to find that out when we start setting up our render scenes what we want to do before we actually finish off and start creating that render scene is clicking a few of these trees at absolute random and then just increasing the age of these trees so it isn't all identical we do want to emphasize the rear row with some aged trees and some larger trees so we're just going to scale them up all the way to create the valley-like effect now i think i'm going to need a lot more trees on this side but let's start by setting up our render what we want to do is find the perfect spot for the house so we click to create our first image and we want to start somewhat close to the house you can already see the house reflecting on the water down here which means we're going to have that much of the image flipped over when we take it into photoshop so that can be a really good indicator for you guys to know how much of the building to showcase if you need to go back more if you need to go closer again that's completely up to you so what we want to do is line it up central or however you want because this is your image that you're rendering so create it however you like try and position it so you're in line with the horizon you're going to be able to figure it out pretty quickly when you go below the water level because we are actually creating a mirrored effect so what we want to do is just line it up perfectly i think that's just a little bit off so i'm going to try to line it up a little bit better and save that image there i personally don't think these trees are all the right size so i'm going to make a couple of them bigger again the one thing you do want to do is create a secondary image looking the opposite way the opposite way just needs to be a large amount of trees and nothing else really so we come back to the house and create our second image of literally just trees you can either do it directly behind or you can also do it behind the actual house where you already have hundreds of hundreds of trees built so completely up to you but you do need a secondary image for the reflection of the windows that i'm going to show you in photoshop in just a minute so we're going to create that second image of just trees okay so now if we go back to image one this is where it becomes critical you want to set up all of your settings perfectly so you don't have to mess with it later if you want to have it on instagram change the format from full hd more custom and change it to 4000 by 5000 that's the perfect instagram ratio for now we're going to change that to full hd and we're going to do the same for image 2. the image already isn't perfect there's a lot of lighting issues going on so we want to try and create the best lighting scenario possible personally for me i always use perth west australia because that's where i am so i know where the settings are you can use them however you want it's completely up to you but i like to have that golden sun coming through so we're going to bring it up to an earlier time maybe august change that north point so the sun definitely starts coming through and shining there we go that's really pretty and we're gonna keep getting a little bit on the left side there okay so we've positioned it so the sun's coming in nice and early it's nice and golden and we have some different textures going on the background doesn't really matter because you can't see in this distance and what we also want to do is change the lighting personally i think that lighting in twin motion at the moment is just horribly wrong so we want to push the shadows to about 500 go to the settings and this sun is cranked up way too high i like to bring that down to about 5 000 and then you can see the scene change so if we go back to our image and go back to our location we have to just amend that time a little bit more so we get the lighting correct but it's not as harsh it's not as overpowering and it doesn't absolutely ruin your image anymore okay so they're roughly the settings i'm going to be using for this render now and all we really have to do at this point is export it and take it into photoshop so if you don't know how to export all you have to do is come down to the export button click on the images and select all and then click export okay so now that our image is exported it is looking fantastic and you could go ahead and post something like this and it would look great but we want to take it to that absolute next level and the way we do this is relatively simple so the first thing you want to do is replace the sky number of ways to do that in photoshop but the easiest way is edit come down to sky replacement and it will automatically replace the sky for you it's fantastic and it's super easy i've used this gray sky by simply googling gray sky and importing it by going down here and clicking the little plus sign you can select any sky you want so if you see i can click on this one and it will change it this sky straight away i can click on a nice beautiful sunset and it will change it to that you can go through any absolute sky you want import any sky you want and it will look a million dollars in two clicks of a button then what you want to do is move the panel over a little bit so you can see the edge of the trees play with these sliders until you're happy with the image quality itself personally i like to shift the edge a little bit play with the textures and the tones just to make it seem a little bit more natural if the sky isn't in the right position for you you can just click and move it whilst that sky replacement software is still open so i probably personally want it somewhere a bit there or i think i've gone too far and lost that little bit of sky there and there we go i'm happy with that so my sky replacement is done now because we are flipping and mirroring this image we want to highlight everything go ctrl e or command e whatever you're working on and group them into one image so now we have our image but the windows are still pretty average what we want to do is go through and marquee every one of these windows to be able to mask over our image of just trees so we start by bringing in our tree image of just trees and painting it over top i'm going to hide that layer for the time being and zoom into my windows i'm going to use my lasso tool to outline every one of these windows so i can cut in those trees in front of this so i'm going to speed through this part again but it's literally just clicking through and selecting your window you want to make sure that this double square is clicked otherwise you're not going to be able to continuously keep going so i'll see you guys in a second when i've highlighted all of these windows okay so now we have all of our windows marked and that took a little while but you want to make sure they are very clean lines otherwise it just looks sloppy so we want to activate our tree layer again to be able to implement that reflection so we turn on our tree layer and we can still see that we're cutting out all of those trees there so what we do is command copy well control command whatever you're using and then control shift v to make sure they paste in the exact same place now that definitely looks unrealistic we want to reduce the opacity quite far down to maybe about or 18 if not even lower just so we get that nice reflection coming through now's the time we flip mirror and make it look so much better so once again very similar to how we did it with the sky we're going to select all the layers by holding shift and clicking command e to reduce them into one layer i'm going to use my rulers to find the absolute best flipping point so for me it's probably about there and then i'm going to use my polygonal lasso which if you click and hold you can find the polygonal lasso and cut out the top part of our image we want to go ctrl c ctrl shift v and paste an absolute replica of the top half we also want to marquee the bottom half and delete the bottom half of our entire image that's going to make a lot of sense in a little minute we're going to take our top layer our bottom layer whichever one you want they're identical flip them vertically and drag them down to the bottom so now our image is already starting to look a lot better but we aren't just there just yet we want to add one more layer drag it to the bottom come over to the paint bucket and paint that layer black entirely the last thing you have to do is come over to your bottom layer and reduce the opacity to 50 that gives it the optical illusion of that mirrored black water okay so that's two out of three steps completed and that image is already looking fantastic however there is one last step that you can take to make this image look so much better and this step is completely optional it's up to you if you like that style or not but personally i think it isn't there just yet so what we're going to do is highlight them all merge them again go file save as save it to our desktop as a png we'll name it lake house now we're going to take that image in to lightroom okay okay so now we have that image imported into lightroom and there is a million and one different ways you can color grade any image but i've gone ahead and created my own presets specifically for twin motion exports if you want to download them and make your life so much easier there's a link down in the description they're only about nine australian dollars so they're very cheap they're not very expensive but they make images look so so much better so on the side i've already imported all my presets and there's a number of different options we can have a dark moody winter look or we can have a more vibrant autumn look personally i'm liking the autumn external look for this image here so i'm going to stick with that and it's already if we just flick through you can see a huge difference in that color grading so there's not too much more i really want to change here i might use the paint brush tool to just paint over this sky a little bit because it's a little bit dark for me in my opinion and do the same down the bottom okay so i've painted over that much of the sky and that much of the water with the settings here on the right hand side all i'm going to do is click done and that image is completed the lightroom section of this tutorial is incredibly simple purely for the fact that i've already set up my presets and made them available for you guys as well so if you do want to support me out as a creator and as an architect just simply download the presets and you can create something just as special as this in absolutely no time anyway that's all for me today guys thank you so much for watching i hope you enjoyed the video if you did make sure you smash that subscribe button down below if you have any questions for me please leave a comment i do check them very often and i try to reply to every single person i usually tend to just reply to the new comments so don't bother re-replying just post another comment and i will get back to you but until then i will see you in the next one

Channel: David Tomic

Views: 2,700

Keywords: video, sharing, camera phone, video phone, free, upload, architect, architecture student, architect student, building architect, david tomic

Id: MVqXvs41JvY

Length: 16min 23sec (983 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 01 2021