Interior Lighting in Twinmotion for Realistic and Balanced Architectural Visualizations

While natural light is powerful, interiors often need artificial light. This will make it feel more realistic and balanced.

If I go back into here and click library and then lights, you can see many different light types and elements. Twinmotion offers four main types of lights. There are point lights, spotlights,  area lights, omnidirectional lights, and emissive materials.

So point lights,  these are more of these IES lights. These are coming from a specific point of an object. So a specific point where a light bulb is at in a specific light fixture.

These emit light in all directions, but from a single point. So here you can see quickly what each of these lights are doing. They're spreading, they're focusing, they're having a large kind of,  kind of, you know, space.

So, you know, a lot of these, you kind of want to do some trial and error to see kind of what you like. For example, if I like this light, I would drag it on top of here and you can see that it is creating a general light below this. I'll delete that.

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Next are spotlights. So spotlights are these right here. Spotlights, projector lights, both very similar.

These cast a focus cone of light similar to track lighting or a gallery spotlight. They're perfect for highlighting artwork, action walls, or specific furniture pieces. If I was to click here and then here, all of a sudden, now I have where this cone angle is at and you can adjust that.

So it's very similar to one of these IES lights, where it's a specific point and goes down, but it's a more generic light source. Then we have area lights. So these are large rectangular sources.

These ones are rectangular sources and there's also like omnidirectional kind of objects. So these are more like loose light based areas. Linear lights would be like a linear light element and that's something you would put in a linear light fixture to bump up the glow.

Area light is like a general light in that space. And then omnidirectional lights are like basically three-dimensional light balls that are in the space. So you can put that kind of in the middle of the space and it will help kind of glow that area.

You can drag this, you can turn on shadows and it'll start casting shadows where that specific light is at and reflections on ground and whatnot. And then there's the last is emissive materials. So instead of a separate light object, you can assign a material that glows.

So this works beautifully for LED strips,  neon signage, decorative fixtures, these recessed can lights. The trick to realism is layering these types together. For example, in this living room, natural daylight fills a space.

We want to point lights from lamps to add warmth and a few spotlights to accent the decor. We don't need an actual light source to glow this. We just want little accent lights here and there.

In the kitchen in the back, this is where we're going to need more artificial light because we're not getting as much natural daylight back there. On the most common mistakes that I see is over lighting. Filling every corner with bright, even light.

Real spaces don't look like that and it kills the atmosphere. Instead, use a layered lighting approach. Ambient lighting for overall fill,  task lighting for specific activities, and accent lighting for mood and emphasis.

And then for each light source, there are specific settings. So for example, this omnidirectional light that I put inside here, there are settings for intensity and attenuation, which is your circular box of how far this light spreads. If I was to do a spotlight, this is going to have a little bit different settings.

This is going to have, you can see this kind of cone angle. I can adjust the cone angle from that to be a really detailed spotlight to kind of spread out across general lighting. As I go down, you can see that I have intensity as well.

This will create the brightness of that light. And then I have color temperature. Do I want it to be a very kind of reddish orange light or a very cool blue light? Gives you that flexibility on that light fixture.

And then there's shadows. This is where I can actually enable the shadows to be here. The radius would create softer shadows versus harsher shadows.

So depending on if I want to create more shadows from these fixtures, this is a good tool when I'm adding these lights on here that I want to get some of these kind of accurate shadows within it. So overall, just by adding that one light fixture, you can see that I'm creating some nice depth and shadows from those fixtures. And there's haze.

Do I want this light to be kind of hazy? And then miscellaneous will show your reflections. Does this light reflect the ground and like the surface on the couch, right? So there's these different settings that really play up these different lights. So that's essentially the light fixtures.

Emissive light materials will be located in materials. And then I go all the way down to neons. This is where I will have emissive light materials.

I have neon one, neon two, a blinking light,  a sharp blink. These are more for like strobe light type stuff. And then police beacons and whatnot.

If I was to go zoom into one of these light fixtures, I can already see that there is looks like a general light here, right? I'm going to click this. That is a light that came in here. I'm going to drag this neon one over this.

And then I don't see much of a difference. But once I start dragging this glow, I can start seeing it being bright, especially in the back over here. I'm going to start seeing this.

So this is where I want to kind of start playing around with what this looks like with these lights. And how bright they want to be and adjusting and whatnot. So that's the missing material there.

So I'm going to go into here. I'm going to delete the spotlight. I'm going to delete this omnidirectional light.

Remember, any objects that we want to put,  we want to put in the correct folders and clean that up. So once I add lights, I'm going to be putting them inside this folder right here. I'm going to save my file.

And in the next video,  we are going to be adding interior lights to this scene, trying to brighten up the kitchen,  making sure each of these scenes the lighting looks really good. I will see you in the next video.