Twinmotion To Unreal Engine Workflow | How?

okay so in the last couple weeks I've been exploring a lot with real-time workflows mostly chaos Vantage and Unreal Engine but have I been ignoring the best workflow I don't know let's talk about it [Music] so the thing we haven't discussed yet is Twin motion twin motion might be the perfect middle ground for giving me all the things I love about Unreal Engine but without the complexity and the learning curve I can place things easily in real time and compose my shots in real time animate in real time also it has a huge vast library of assets available that can be easily placed and quickly scaled moved rotated in real time you know from my Unreal Engine videos that I love the ability to do that and that's kind of what is lacking sometimes in the 3ds Max Plus Vantage workflow however you also know that I think simple programs are sometimes too simple they're really easy to learn like you can learn twin Motion in a couple days and be up and running and be making nice stuff with it but that means you're probably limited when you want to go above and beyond and make something more spectacular or just more complex and more advanced you will notice in Twin motion that you do not have nearly as much control over everything like you do in Unreal Engine in Unreal Engine you have almost too much control you can control everything but sometimes that's what you want so let's look at this this workflow and see if it is the happy medium because it's important to remember that twin motion can be bridged to Unreal Engine and that's why it's appealing to me maybe it is the easiest and fastest way to build out a real-time environment for example but then if you decide this isn't good enough you don't have to start over all that will translate to Unreal Engine and then you can have as much power as you would ever need so let's go through the workflow step by step and look at the examples that I got from each different step of the process okay so twin motion has come a long way since the beginning it but it still has its Essentials it is still a simple software to use with just basic tools but it can do some nice real-time things and they've added a lot of features that I in my opinion make it quite a bit better to launch twin motion and to get it you just have to go to your epic games launcher go to the twin motion tab make sure you've got the version you want and then launch it now keep in mind in 3ds Max twin motion works with data Smith just like unreal does so if you have the data Smith exporter in 3ds Max you can save as a data Smith file and that will actually translate all your v-ray materials and even lights everything your whole model into twin motion then in Twin motion you can just import your data Smith file it works quite seamlessly I would say it's exactly as seamless as I have shown in the Unreal Engine version of this workflow so I'm going to open up this same cabin file that I've shown with data Smith and Chaos Vantage and show you what I was able to do in Twin motion and you're seeing it come up on the screen now and one cool thing about twin motion is that it actually has a path Tracer in it just like Unreal Engine does so this is actually a path traced rendering here you can turn off path Tracer up here and you'll see what it looks like in my opinion it looks like total garbage without the path tracer on that is what I think about twin motion it does not have Lumen built in like Unreal Engine does so frankly the Real Time stuff like real-time GI or any of those kind of things it just isn't nearly as good as what Unreal Engine has built into it I have a hard time getting good results I mean this looks fine over here I guess right that's okay this light obviously has too much fog built into it what you'll find is that you don't have nearly as much control as you do in Unreal Engine especially over like the height fog and things like that I really wanted to to make this look like my Unreal Engine version of the same project but I really struggled with that you can put in hdris you can you can add fog to some extent it's you just don't have nearly as much control the nice thing is that you can place things in here and you can do the foliage painting much like you can do an Unreal Engine so you can see I've built out the scene I painted in trees I painted in foliage up here I even added in mega scan stuff you can do I mean you can add in these rocks but you can actually go to Mega scans here and find 3D assets nature huge rocks drop them in here place them just like you do in Unreal Engine so I've I've kind of built out the scene trying to make it look like my Unreal Engine version but I didn't really get the lighting to look the same so I went with this daylight and of course like in Twin motion of the past you can go into Media mode and this is where you can really refine what your scene is going to look like so say we go to this image here it's got the path tracer on we could turn it off but we could also you know this is where you can change the weather to be rainy you know and this stuff is kind of cheesy but I can see why some people would want it you know make a snow scene path tracer on with snow does that work it does okay so with the pathways you can actually get pretty good results on your rendering and I'll show you I the nice thing about twin motion is you can J you can animate in real time which you guys know I love right so being able to animate in real time is a huge deal and you can do that in here so I did some animations and I spit them out and you'll see what the path traced animation looks like which I think is pretty good and you'll see what the not path traced animation looks like which I think looks like crap and then we'll take it on to Unreal Engine and see what we can do from there okay so this is kind of cool like it's super easy to play stuff build out an environment change the weather add wind you know all that kind of stuff super easy in here and that's the appeal of twin motion but when you think like oh this is not good enough I need more control I need higher quality what are you gonna do well you can take it to Unreal Engine so first let's check out the animations that I was able to generate from here and then we'll take it into unreal and see what we can do from there [Applause] thank you [Applause] [Music] okay so in here when we want to go to Unreal Engine we just have to go to file export the data Smith file straightforward I actually don't know the different I haven't tested the difference between these two things I'm not sure what it does straightforward versus optimized I'll have to experiment with that more but you export it to data Smith and then you can just import it into Unreal Engine just like we've seen with a data Smith file out of 3ds Max exactly the same so let's go into Unreal Engine now and see how that works I am in Unreal Engine 5.2 and one thing you need to keep in mind is that you need to go to the marketplace and you need to get the twin motion content so it downloads a huge content pack twin motion content data Smith twin motion content okay data Smith twin motion content for Unreal Engine December 12 2022 that's the one you want and this just makes it so that the everything from Twin motion will come in and translate to the correct content that you want like a lot of those those trees all those assets in Twin motion need to be downloaded so that when you bring it into Unreal Engine it has them okay you need to install that to the engine you're using okay this is actually updated as of June 20 of June 6 2023 so this is the newest stuff it works with the latest twin motion the latest unreal and this latest plugin in unreal you also have to go to your plugins and make sure that data Smith data Smith twin motion content is checked okay so all the data Smith needs to be on days with importer data Smith content holy cow there's a lot of data dismissed stuff but the data Smith twin motion content definitely needs to be on okay and you would just go to here and say add data Smith and find your twin motion file which I've already done and it comes in I have it on a different level here okay in here here is my cabin my area light is coming in from Twin motion and I don't want that so actually I can turn it off and make sure it's not showing in game so that it doesn't render right but you can see all my content is here and now I was able to get the lighting how I wanted because I brought in the same hdri that I used in my original Unreal Engine cabin file so we'll look at the animation that I generated from here and you can see it's getting to the same level basically as as my Unreal Engine from scratch did but the added benefit is that I was able to draw on all the assets that were inside of twin motion that aren't natively inside of Unreal Engine so like these trees for example these are not Mega scans so these aren't available to me in Unreal Engine here but I placed them in Twin motion and they came across in data Smith okay so here you can get really nice control of your lighting obviously as we've seen before with Unreal Engine quite nice but of course Unreal Engine is not nearly as simple and easy to use as twin motion is Twin motion you can learn in an afternoon Unreal Engine you could spend your lifetime learning right that's what I mean by simple versus complex but also powerful versus not as powerful right so here's what it looks like in here I generated animation of this too which I think looks really good very equivalent to what I did before with the cabin in Unreal Engine but now with the added benefit of some twin motion assets that I didn't have okay so these rocks aren't as good as the mega scans trees I placed before but of course I could have placed the same Mega scan sorry the mega scan rocks but I could have placed the same Mega scan rocks that I did before in Twin motion because they're actually in there too so overall it's pretty slick the only thing that didn't work is that when these trees came in there was some LOD issues yeah there were some LOD issues and there was some some texture issues that just needed to be slightly adjusted in the static mesh here so like I had to turn I had to put the lods so that there's only one of them and then apply changes because it was giving me I mean I could change the distances too but basically the lods were showing up if you don't know what lods are the the level of detail stuff so it went as this gets further away from the camera it was showing a much simplified model but it was displaying the simplified model like everywhere so I could adjust the distances but I just turned off that because I want this tree to always show up full resolution but those were the only issues I had with the data Smith import otherwise it just completely worked and yeah it was ready to render so let's look at the animation I was able to generate from this and then we'll talk about what this workflow means what the pros and cons are [Applause] thank you Okay so we've seen what twin motion can do now what does this mean for my workflow well twin motion fills a specific gap for me personally it is the gap of I need something simple and quick and I need a bunch of assets to add to this simple model and I want to take it to a real-time animation quickly so if I had it fully built out I'd probably use Vantage to do that if I just had the model and wanted to build out an environment around it I'd probably take it into twin motion and add a bunch of assets and then do some real-time animation with it probably using the path eraser but also if I wanted to say have a quick VR experience of a 3D model that I have twin motion would be my obvious choice there because you can easily just data Smith it into twin motion export it from Twin motion as a VR experience and boom that's super quick super easy and you've got your VR okay so there's if you don't know in Twin motion there's various different ways you can export VR is one of them I would definitely be using it there and the awesome thing about it that I love is that if I then decide I want a cinematic animation of it and I want more control over the lighting and the atmosphere and all that stuff I can easily just data Smith it into unreal and keep going and I don't lose any of the work I've already done in Twin motion the other gap I see it filling not necessarily for me because I already know Unreal Engine but if you didn't know Unreal Engine and it seemed intimidating to you then I can see you saying okay but I still want the benefit of real-time tools and all these assets I'm going to go straight to Twin motion right so if Unreal Engine is overwhelming and it has too much control too much power then I can see people definitely wanting to use twin motion instead okay if you're in that boat and you want to learn twin motion I do have a course for that although it's a little bit outdated at this point I'm going to be adding the latest software updates to it over the next coming months and have it all updated but also if you want to learn the Unreal Engine workflow for doing something like a cinematic animation or just getting up to speed with Unreal Engine in general check out the links to my course below which is always discounted for YouTube Watchers check it out you can learn the whole workflow super easily and super cheap so there's no need to be overwhelmed with Unreal Engine if you don't know it you can learn it I'm confident but also there is Twin motion that is a good substitute or in between okay so that's my take on Twin motion I think it's a solid saw software I love that they're updating it and adding in all these Mega scan assets all these other assets and I love that it has a path Tracer my results without the path Tracer I wasn't a big fan of but with the pass Tracer it's pretty awesome okay so let me know in the comments what you think please like this video if you find it useful and please subscribe if you want to continually stay up to to date with the best workflows the best software the best tutorials of how to use all those software all the content that I'm making subscribe to never miss out and I will see you in the next video thank you for watching

Channel: Adam Z - Learn Archviz

Views: 10,018

Keywords: archviz, learnArchViz, Twinmotion archviz, Twinmotion 2023, Twinmotion, Twinmotion tutorial, Twinmotion Unreal Engine workflow, Twinmotion Datasmith, Twinmotion 2023 to Unreal Engine 5, Twinmotion vs Chaos Vantage, Twinmotion + Unreal Engine, Twinmotion export to Unreal Engine, Twinmotion 3ds Max workflow, 3ds Max to Twinmotion, Twinmotion vs Unreal Engine 5, Twinmotion vs ue5, Twinmotion 2023 features, 3ds max + Twinmotion + Unreal, datasmith to Twinmotion

Id: PQ1DzeDCWtM

Length: 15min 38sec (938 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 04 2023