Light and Atmosphere in Twinmotion with Sun, Sky, and HDRI Environmental Settings

Let's dive into how to control light and atmosphere in your Twinmotion scene using the environmental settings. This first of two environmental focus videos will cover the sky, sunlight, and HDRI background systems. Lighting is everything.

It affects how materials look, how shadows fall, and the mood of your render. Twinmotion offers intuitive real-time tools to dial in lighting for any time, place, or season. So let's first begin by clicking on the environmental tool right here.

And you can see, I'll just start off from the top, right? So environmental preset, there are presetted versions of how you want. Let's say you want to start off with like, okay, I want a golden hour type scene. You know, I'll start off with that, right? And so that's a kind of a good starting point.

Or let's say I want a sunny coast or a sunset glow, right? There are different kinds of settings that we can start off with. So in this case, I'll start off with a golden hour. And I'll kind of pre-set things up.

The next right here section is dynamic sky versus HDRI. So dynamic sky is one of the new features in Twinmotion 2025. This allows you to actually operate and adjust the sky itself with the density of the clouds and the movement.

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So you really can create your own kind of mood and scene with the clouds. Keep in mind that this sun in a dynamic sky is active. So like you can see it moving across the sky.

So that's really impactful when you're doing animations. And if you notice where the clouds sit would affect the way that the sun is shining and some of the glare effects. So you know those are like real-time effects that this has.

You can even see some of the lens flares happening. So all kinds of really kind of fun things. HDRI is where you can have kind of pre-set backdrops for your model.

So here it kind of gives you this kind of standard noon clear. Keep in mind that where the sun is at is fixed. You can rotate your HDRI kind of bubble sky.

But the sun can't move. You'll still be able to get lens flares and things like that based off of it. But it's not going to affect like an animation sunset.

You want to use the dynamic sky version for that. But sometimes these HDRI skies have some better quality skies. To download and to update an HDRI sky would actually go into the HDRI environments here in the library.

And here you can look at skies and different backgrounds to use. So for skies to give you three options of low sun,  morning, afternoon sun. I say this is kind of around the like the 9 a.m time frame to the 4 p.m time frame.

These will be like sunsets where it's really low in the sky. They'll give you some options on clear or cloudy depending on what you want. And you can see that there's all these different ones where the sun is really setting or it's a little bit higher up.

I've noticed in from looking at this where it starts off with one usually the sun's at kind of in the highest portion of this section. And then all the way in the bottom is the sun's in the very like kind of lowest portion of it. So kind of all goes between kind of time.

And if you want one specifically let's say I like this right here. This low sun cloudy 14. I'll click this little arrow to download it.

I would wait you know anywhere between 5 and 15 seconds depending on how long you're or how slow your internet is. And once this download I would actually click hold and drag onto here. And that will replace this backdrop sky with this new one that I downloaded.

And a lot of times like it's going to affect the lighting of your building as well. Like if the low sun is kind of lower in the sky has more of a kind of orangish tone. It will kind of affect the overall mood and feel.

So you can see just by doing this that kind of gave it more of this gloomy overcast view. I can obviously rotate where the sun is at and that depends on you know your north arrow of your building. You know if it's north is this direction and this is you know a low sun.

The low sun can either be in the morning or it can be in the afternoon. That's kind of interesting thing here. So then you have like your intensity.

This is how like basically how intense that sun is. The lower the setting the more contrast you'll have in your sky and you can always like bump up your other kind of things. So you want to kind of find those like sweet spot balance between the intensity and the lower.

And then you got obviously HDRI effects lighting. Does this actual sun affect the overall lighting of your building or not at all? Those are kind of things to kind of adjust depending on your view. You can actually match the HDRI directional light with this or you can actually manually adjust the lighting separate from the HDRI.

If you typically are trying to be more realistic where the sun's at you're going to want to match the lighting with the HDRI. And then you your season. This is kind of adjusting like your rain weather.

In the dynamic sky this would actually potentially cause rain. You actually can see that now there's like rain coming down. Further you go how much water is on the ground.

So you can really play around with your kind of scene. And then you know this will be your weather whether it's snowing or is it raining. Kind of play around with kind of all that.

And then this will be your season. If you have specific trees. If you're kind of here in the summer or fall you know that's going to determine how many leaves or the leaves are going to be changing colors.

Then you have you know wind speed. This will change so you can see now all of a sudden the rain is at a pretty steep angle versus it being straight down. If you have trees that are really blowing the wind you can adjust the direction of the wind.

You can add fog. You can adjust the density of the fog. How far the fog travels.

Where it's at. You know you can really kind of play around with your whole kind of scene to create something really kind of unique and special. You know you can adjust the color of the fog.

You know depending on like what kind of vibe that you're even wanting to go with. Then you have your horizon. You can create this kind of backdrop.

Although you can't really see with the fog. But if I disable the fog now you can kind of see that I have this skyline that I have out here. You know I have this 3D kind of mountain range thing.

I can actually get rid of that starting landscape. Then you can see more of the backdrop city. You know there's just like eight standard ones.

European city, waterfront, city island, bay, mountains, countryscape,  town, city. So you can kind of can play around with that. You know you can rotate it around.

You know you can bring back the fog. If you bring the density down you even kind of see what that does to the backdrop. All right so that's kind of the HDRI sky.

If I kept this the same then all of a sudden I changed it to this one where it's a lot more kind of darker and sunset. You'll see kind of a big change. I want to kind of demonstrate this real fast.

So you can see it kind of made some modifications. I can adjust the intensity of this depending on how like I want that to adjust. I can do the rotation for it.

You can see that it's automatically reflecting that in the glass that I have made there and it's reflecting on the ground and the water. It really has some really nice atmospheric kind of vibes with this. You know I want to go just for just for fun I want to modify the material of this Cybertruck.

I want to add some metal to that. So I'm going to materials. There's actually a thing down here called car paint where I can actually do like car paint silver, matte silver, kind of all the way down to kind of whatever I want.

I'll do this like car paint,  matte silver just so I can throw in a more kind of accurate material. Maybe I want this to be a little more able some flakes make it maybe more reflective of the actual sun in the sky. Now if I was to like go back to here and like rotate this around you can see how it's affecting the the Cybertruck kind of sheen and shine.

So pretty kind of interesting kind of things to look at for dynamic sky. If I want to again like get rid of the rain and all I can just kind of go back the scene the style and kind of just get it to what I want. So that's um HDRI.

You know typically with an HDRI I'm not going to want to necessarily do animations because HDRI actually takes a lot longer to render out animations than kind of a dynamic sky. But certainly that is an option if you want to do that. So HDRIs usually they need more control but they provide a bit more realism.

However the dynamic sky is a new thing and actually it's competes pretty good with it. But typically I will use it on the HDRI sky if I want to really polish final rendering. Let's go look at the dynamic sky.

So go back to dynamic sky here and this is where you know you can actually adjust again the time of day. And so just like how those HDRI skies were like the time of day would also do that because it's a very similar thing on where that sun is at and what the kind of mood and the vibe is. What makes it kind of unique is you actually have more controls over the intensity of the sky and then also the temperature as well and then the size of the sun.

You can have so many more controls over what kind of happens with this as well as kind of the location in the month right. If you're really specific like I want this to be in December and I want this to be in this time of time of the day you can really get really specific and as well as like you know you can adjust your um your actual location geolocation to affect the exact location of the sun. And then you can adjust your north to fit with that too.

So before we move on to the next section where we're going to look more at how to utilize the weather, the fog, the sky, cloud coverage in dynamic sky. We want to remember that the sky and the lighting really affects everything else about in your scene. So you want to kind of revisit your materials and vegetation and views once you've chosen your environmental lighting system and maybe make some modifications to those.

So sometimes once you once you have materials you may have to go back to those and adjust them kind of as needed. Or I'll see you in the next video.