Discover how to create believable scenes in Twinmotion with the application of various materials to provide texture, reflectivity, and depth. Explore the utilization of built-in material systems and learn how to integrate them directly with Quixel Megascans for photorealistic assets and textures.
Key Insights
- Materials in Twinmotion are more than just colors; they offer texture, reflectivity, and depth to surfaces, creating more believable scenes. The software has a robust built-in material system and can integrate directly with Quixel Megascans for additional photorealistic assets and textures.
- The application of materials involves dragging and dropping selected materials onto the surface of the scene. Materials can be previewed and selected from categories like concrete, wood, glass, metal, and more. Each of these categories includes pre-built materials optimized for Twinmotion.
- Materials can be adjusted and customized according to the user's needs, including changes in luminosity, color, texture size, rotation, and roughness. Reflectivity can be adjusted with the roughness setting, allowing users to achieve the desired finish for their materials.
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So in this section, we're going to focus on one of the most critical steps in creating a believable scene, which is applying and editing materials. Yeah, materials are more than just color, they give texture, reflectivity, and depth to the surfaces. Twinmotion offers a robust built-in material system and integrates directly with Quixel Megascans for additional photorealistic assets and textures.
Let's start by opening the library tab on the left and selecting materials. You'll see categories like concrete, wood, glass, metal, stones, brick, ground, 3D grass, plastic, wall coverings, roof coverings, ceilings, grids, marble, and granite, tiles, fabric, leather, neons, which are like light emitting materials, videos, water, subsurface, modeling, car paint, and tire. Each of these boxes include pre-built materials that are optimized for Twinmotion.
You can scroll through and preview thumbnails when you find something you like, simply drag and drop it onto the surface of your scene. So let's go work through that. So let's say I'm going to work on this little surface right here, right? I want this to be wood.
If I click wood, you can see that there are lots of various options of types of wood, right? There's wood siding, there's wood flooring. If you scroll all the way down, you'll kind of see more monolithical wood surfaces. If I'm happy with a material, and I want to try that one, I'll use this mahogany.
I can click it, hold my left mouse button, and drag it onto the surface. What it will do is it will apply that material to all of the surfaces that have that current material. As you can see in this model, all of this background has that same material.
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So maybe that's not a good example of what to do. Let's say I want to modify this one right here, this little area down here. I'm going to drag my wood onto that.
Okay, so as you can see, it applied this material to this. And it even has this little graphic texture. I can delete this.
So it's really just seeing the wood material. And I have this object above it. So this will give you a good understanding of maybe reflectivity and how this object works and functions.
You can see that where I move my image around, it reflects light differently on where the sun is. When the sun is behind the camera, the sun, which is the sun is over here. Where is the sun? There it is.
When the sun is behind the camera, it will reflect the light off of the surface and bounce it back. If I was to click my eyedropper tool and modify this material, you will see on your right that there's a series of settings for each of these. There is luminosity, which increases the brightness of that material, the vibrancy of that material.
And there's individual colors adjustments, which is adjusting the texture bump map to this, which is, you know, adjusting the saturation of that bump, the gamma and lift. All those things kind of will adjust that that bump layer. And then here is where you can actually adjust the color of the actual wood.
If I want the wood to be more gray and light, I can adjust it or darker or brighter, things like that. That's how I adjust the color of the wood. If I want to be a very bright, vibrant, bold color, that's kind of what I would do for that.
As I scroll down, you'll see UV. This is where I can actually adjust the size of the texture itself. Twinmotion automatically has a standard size of what comes in there, but there may be situations where you would like to increase or decrease the scale of the material.
This is where you can rotate the material. You know, you can drag it to rotate along or you can type in, click this and then type in, say, 90. I want to rotate the material 90 degrees.
Now it's going in this direction. Scale. This is where I can drag the slider to type in two and it will be two times the scale or four times the scale or 20 times the scale.
As you can see, the texture image is a JPEG image with a certain pixel number. As I increase that, the more grainy and blurry the image will be. So I'm just going back to the standard one.
Maybe I'll do it at two so you can see a little bit more of that grain detail to it. As I scroll down on the properties for this material, I'll see roughness. This is essentially reflectivity.
So as I, the higher the number is, the more rough and less reflective it is. As you can see, by going 100% we're not really getting any reflectivity from the sun or this object itself. If I drag this all the way down to zero, you can see that I am getting reflectivity from the sphere as well as the sun and the clouds.
So depending on the type of finish that you want, if you want a really high gloss finish wood or you want something that's a little more in between, you're going to want to adjust this slider to really fit the needs that you want. It is really cool to see this in real time and see exactly what type of material and quality that you want to achieve. This same process can be applied to any of the other materials that we have.
For example, if I want to modify this sphere as a different type of material, let's say I want that to be leather, right? There's a lot of pre-made leather materials. Let's say I want this nubuck leather. I'm going to drag and drop it onto it and you can automatically see that it is providing a leather material texture to that.
Again, I could decrease the roughness for it to be more of a shiny leather versus a flat leather. So lots of cool things to do with materials and it's really easy as a simple drag and drop. One thing to note is if you were select this eyedropper tool and you can continue to drag this surface on, but as soon as you do, it will link the objects together in the materials.
For example, after I selected this wood and if I was to drag this over to here, now all of a sudden these two objects are linked and if I wanted to change this to leather, it would change both and there's no way to undo that move unless doing, you know, CTRL Z on my keyboard to undo. So be very careful that if you were to apply another one of these woods, you can actually go down into your materials right here and you can see this and you can actually duplicate that and then if you were to drag that duplication on here and you were to adjust that specific material, it would only adjust that one and not the other. If you do like that, say I love that color, I want to put it on something else, but I still want to isolate it and not have it be centrally merged together, that would be the good situation to do.
