Explore the dynamics of making adjustments to models in Twinmotion and Revit, focusing on how changes in elements and materials in Revit reflect in Twinmotion. Learn how to synchronize these changes, apply specific materials, and avoid overriding work done in Twinmotion while making changes in Revit.
Key Insights
- Changes made to the model elements in Revit, such as adjusting the mullion to a different height, are automatically synchronized and reflected in Twinmotion. This dynamic sync feature ensures a quick update of changes, saving time.
- Applying materials in Revit, such as assigning brick material to a wall, carries through to Twinmotion upon synchronization. However, when applying materials on specific surfaces, one needs to use the paint tool in Revit. The applied materials then appear on the corresponding surfaces in Twinmotion after synchronization.
- While working with Twinmotion and Revit, it's crucial to avoid making significant material replacements in Twinmotion until the model's geometry in Revit is mostly stable. This approach helps to prevent the overriding of work done in Twinmotion when changes are made in Revit. It's also recommended to batch changes in Revit and sync them all at once, reducing the risk of overriding and keeping the file more stable.
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Now that our model is in Twinmotion, let's talk about materials and adjustments in Revit and how they carry through. So let's take, I'm going to pan out a bit and kind of look at this element and how the refresh tool links.
Let's say I don't like this mullion that happened in here or I change that later on. Let's go back into my Revit model and we click on the mullion right here. You can click tab to go through that and let's say I want this mullion to be at you know two feet, not at three foot six.
Now if I was to go back to my view in Twinmotion and do synchronize and then if I was to go back into Twinmotion, minimize this and wait a minute, you can see here that it already automatically brought this down to two feet. It would actually happen quicker than for me going back there. That is incredible.
So any sort of live model adjustments, it'll automatically refresh and sync. So let's say for example that I want this exterior material to be brick. How would I go about doing that? So in Revit, this wall right here has a general material.
If I go to edit type you can see that my material is based off of my structure which is based off of material. So there's no material assigned to this. If I want to assign this material as one of the built-in Revit materials, I would click the little box and I would maybe I'll do a little search for brick and there's brick common, right? So that's the material that I want for this material.
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I'm going to click okay. Click okay and you can see here that now brick has been applied all over the building. One thing to note is that it is only on one side where we have the brick.
On the interior or on the other side, it's just a generic color. And for example, I may not want brick to be on the interior of this. So for example, this wall right here, I may want to flip this one around, right? So it's not so it looks like that the brick is on the outside and not on the inside.
This actually is an interior wall anyways. So that may not even be the case. So a lot of times what I would do in a model, we typically don't use basic walls.
We would have an exterior wall and we would have an interior wall, right? We have multiple types of walls. If we wanted to do something a little bit more flexible, I want to adjust my section box. Slide it to the interior so I can see this.
We can actually paint a wall surface something. So let's go into this little tool thing here called paint. I click this.
This will open up our kind of our material project browser. We knew that there is a gypsum wall material that was previously selected for the other one, so I don't want gypsum wall board. I can actually click this and then here I can actually paint that surface.
You can see that it painted the interior surface and I want to paint this one as well. See here that there's actually two walls on top of each other. There's this large exterior wall and there is an interior wall.
So I can actually delete one of those. And here I can see that I just painted that wall surface right here. Gypsum wall board.
And again I can see that there's a wall in the back that's brick. I can paint that. I want that you know to be that material.
So then if I was to again adjust my section box, slide it out all the way outside. Now if I was to do a refresh, go to view in Twinmotion, click this and do synchronize. Then I minimize my Revit window.
I look inside here. I can see that that material already came through as that brick material. I've looked on the interior.
I now have this as gypsum wall board and this as gypsum wall board. So that's a really cool feature of just modify materials and how that works. If I wanted to paint these different surfaces as different materials later on, I can do that.
Like for example, this countertop is as a counter and there's a backsplash right? WT1. All these are different types of materials per each thing. So something else to watch out for is any sort of material that you've already customized in Twinmotion can sometimes get overwritten when you sync.
For example, if you replaced the Revit brick wall with a high quality Megascan brick made by Twinmotion, then you re-sync after changing that wall in Revit. Twinmotion may overwrite your material and bring back the Revit one. So for example, let's say that I'm working on this brick wall here and I want to use one of these high quality brick materials.
So I click this modern brick facade, make sure I'm signed in, download this brick facade material, and drag it on top of here. You can see the scale comes in really small so I can actually modify that scale over to my UV. So let's say I have this material now which looks very nice.
And let's say that I'm sad I've been doing all this extra work and then the client or I'm starting to develop my Twinmotion model and this model, this thing is going to change to this 8 inch masonry because we never updated it right? And now if I was to go to Twinmotion and I was to synchronize this and go back to Twinmotion, you can see here that it overrided it in a sense where that that wall there now is this portion here. It still kept the same material because it was a brick material, but the profile that changed. If I was to look at this material here and go to edit and structure, I could see that it's concrete masonry.
However, I painted over it so hence why it stayed the same. So keep that in mind as you kind of update the model that if you do any sort of changes it possibly can update and remove certain things that you've done. So that's one thing that's something that we'll need to kind of work through as you start getting more and more kind of into your model and how it works.
So let's try to keep any major material replacements until later in the design process once the geometry is mostly stable. If you know a wall that's going to move 10 times before it's finished, don't spend time perfecting this material yet. Focus on the structure first, detail later.
And also don't hit synchronize after every tiny change in Revit. Instead, make a batch of changes and then check your model and then sync. This reduces the risk of overriding Twinmotion work and keeps your file more stable.
Alright, so that's the video on doing the syncing between Revit and Twinmotion. Now that we are in Twinmotion with our model, in the next video we're going to talk about how we organize the geometry in the scene graph and how we adjust the layers and the groups to make it very clean and organized.
