Discover how to initiate a new project in Twinmotion, control its visibility, manipulate the geometry and manage material properties. This article takes you through the process of populating a model, saving it, adjusting its origin, and utilizing the Direct Link feature for instant geometry display from Revit to Twinmotion.
Key Insights
- The article provides a step-wise approach to initiate a new project in Twinmotion. It emphasizes the importance of maintaining the hierarchy in the geometry of the project and highlights the process of substituting specific elements or files within the project.
- The article discusses how to manipulate the model's origin via Twinmotion. It suggests either dropping the model onto the ground plane or bringing up the ground plane to correct instances where the building appears to be floating.
- The significance of Twinmotion's Direct Link feature is underlined. It emphasizes how the feature ensures quick display of Revit geometry, respects categories, and supports basic material properties. It also acknowledges that while these materials are quite rudimentary, they can be modified within Revit for greater detail and quality.
This lesson is a preview from our Revit & Twinmotion Interior Rendering Course Online (includes software) and Interior Design Professional Course Online (includes software & exam). Enroll in a course for detailed lessons, live instructor support, and project-based training.
All right, so once Twinmotion opens, this is the dialog box that you will see. Give the option to direct link this to an existing project or to a new project. And then if you open up these options, little drop down menu, there are certain categories that we mentioned earlier, which is, you know, how we're going to collapse the geometry by its hierarchy or by material.
In this case, we want to keep hierarchy. We want to have this be a new project. And then this is kind of where we would substitute specific elements or files within that.
We want to keep this as the standard as new project. Click OK. It'll then ask you to then bring this directly into direct link.
And as you can see, it's starting to populate the model of where it's at. Then from here, the first thing that we should do is we should save the model. We're going to File, Save As.
And then here under our Downloads, wherever we want to do it,  I have a folder called Final Dataset or Final Dataset Working. I have a file that I previously created that we'll be using will be BIM 371 Derek McFarland. We are going to open up.
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This is the file that we will be using or the name, a naming convention to use. So type in BIM 371, first name,  last name, and you click Save. The first thing that we can notice is that we do not need this additional geometry that comes in here.
So that's our starting base. You click the little eyeball here, it'll turn on and off visibility. And then I can click the little three dots to do delete,  or I can hit delete on my keyboard.
Another thing to notice is that this building seems to be floating above this ground right here. That is a case of the origin and how this building is modeled is set up a little bit different from that. So what you can either do is yeah, you can drop this whole thing down onto that ground plane, or you can bring the ground plane up.
If you were to drop this down, then whenever you resync it, it'll bring things back up to that level. So it's best just to bring up the landscape. You can use your right mouse button to pan around till you see the little gizmo down here.
Zoom out so you see both the gizmo and the building. I'm panning using my orbit thing in the middle. So here I want to go click this little element here.
And if I was to click and hold and drag, you can see I'm starting to move this up. I don't want to go above this foundation, just a little bit below. So that way I still see some interior flooring within.
My window is on this end over here. You can see that I have windows and I have interior furniture on the inside. So the first thing you'll notice is like your Revit geometry appears almost instantly, right? That's one of the biggest benefits of Direct Link.
It's fast. You'll see walls, floors, roof structure, elements, and families just as they appeared in Revit. And then Twinmotion also respects the categories.
If you see here built down, there are so many different groups for each of these things. So there is the main building and then there's like this other level two element piece here. If I was to open up this, you can see that there are all these different elements that come in here.
The furniture comes in, the walls come in, the ceilings, they all are being broken down by different pieces. So this is really great when we're wanting to hide pieces or delete elements within here. Everything is broken down by its type.
Yeah, so materials will also come through as well, but usually at a very basic level. Like if I was to click my eyedropper tool right here and then click on this, you can see that this material is a default wall. These are all the materials that came into the model.
So actually quite a bit, right? If you think about all these different furniture pieces and different materials,  they all came in together. But also these materials come in very basic. There's not a whole lot of quality to them.
No bump maps, no extra textural details. So they're very rudimentary materials,  not something that is ideal. However, the building is set up specifically for the different materials per each object.
For example, the interior wall is also the same as the ceiling. The ceiling is gypsum wall, but the exterior wall is the same as the exterior wall. If you want things a little bit different, you'll need to kind of modify some of that.
You can see that this wall right here, gypsum wall board, is different from this wall, which is the default wall. If you want to make those modifications, you can do that within Revit by either painting that surface in Revit or modifying the actual property settings of that specific wall. So what you're seeing here is essentially the structural backbone of your project.
This is the point where visualization starts to take over. So Twinmotion gives you instant feedback with real lighting and shadows, which is already more immersive than what you were getting in Revit. But the real work comes next when we refine, replace materials, add assets,  and really build up the environment.
Before we get into that though, let's take a closer look at how material and model adjustments in Revit behave once they are linked.
