Environmental Settings for Dynamic Lighting and Atmosphere in Twinmotion Scenes

let's take a look at the environmental settings. So within our view here, let's click environment ENV. This is your environmental settings.

So the first thing to note at the very top that there is environmental presets. So there are already some presets available that have specific kind of styles within it. Golden hour kind of gives you already that natural kind of glow and light.

It's a great kind of view if that's something that you are going for versus sunny coast,  right? They all have a different type of vibe that is going with Mars horizon, right? So let's just let's just click golden hour is like I feel like I want to do more of this kind of sunset type mood and feel is what I'm going with. So I want to use this as a starting point preset and then adjust it within it. So let's get into it.

First, we need to determine if we are going to be using a dynamic sky or an HDRI sky. So I'm going to zoom out of our building just so we can see and then I'll turn my camera. Alright, so we currently are showing a dynamic sky.

The dynamic sky is great if you want to animate and adjust the time of day and simulate natural changes. HDRI skies are basically fixed but incredibly realistic. I feel that the dynamic sky within Lumen and Twinmotion, which is a new feature,  might I add, is really good and it's been getting a lot better.

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The HDRI does provide more softer, nuanced lighting with realistic reflections in glass, primarily glass. I feel like glass and polished materials, reflections look so much better with HDRI skies. So but we're not doing exteriors, right? I want to stick with dynamic sky.

I'm going to recommend using dynamic sky as we will have a lot more options with it. So click this interior view, have dynamic sky here. And now this is where we can adjust the time of day.

We can adjust the time of day for in the evening and adjust our north offset. These all became standard within this preset. I am going to recommend that we change some of these based off of my own experience of using this model and the lighting that we want to get.

I first want to go adjust my time of day to be 1925, which is essentially 725. In the evening and I want to adjust my north at north offset. You can see that the sun is moving across the sky.

So it's creating shadows. I want to have a nice little sun shadow kind of right over here. Just like that.

Let's give it give it some interest and shadow play within. If you're using an actual location, you want to be super specific about the lighting. You can manually adjust the north offset and be very specific on where that goes.

But for this, we can be a bit looser and really get the style that we want. Now let's open up this little carrot here and look down. Here is where we have our intensity and temperature, size of the sun, reflections.

Intensity, this is currently at 100,000. I want to bring that down to 20,000. I don't think it needs to be that bright.

And that just feels just kind of generally at a good kind of lighting size or lighting power. Temperature. This is where we can get into our range of color temperature.

This is currently at 65. I want to bring this to 6500. I'll make it slightly warmer sun on the exterior.

Daylight is naturally cooler around 55 to 65. If you want to warm up this environment, you can bump it up higher. Yeah, like a subtle warm shift in color temperature can completely change the mood and style.

So again, go off of the mood and style that you want and go from there. Next is the size. This is the size of the sun.

The smaller the size, the more crisp these shadows are going to be. The larger the size sun, the more softer these shadows are going to be. I'm going to stick in the 2 range, which gives it a little bit of a softer shadow along that wall right there.

And then reflection. Reflection shows if the sun can cause reflections on surfaces. I want to set this down to 0.35. I don't want this to be super reflective sun off of this interior space.

And then next, as we go down to location, this is where we can we can mess with the month of the year, right? If we do more in the winter months, December, January, you're going to get a lot lower sun in the sky versus the summer months where it will be a little bit higher. Alright, I'm going to close location and I'm going to go down to sky. So turbidity, turbidity changes the sky from clear to hazy.

The higher the number, the more hazy the sky will be. I want to set this down really low. I don't want any sort of hazy sky, so I don't just put down to like 0.03, just really low,  just a little bit.

And then the under atmosphere density, this specifies the density of the atmosphere, which impacts the color of the sky. I'm going to set this down also really low to like 0.06. You can kind of see that it's already changing this from like really bright yellow. I'm going to look at the sun on the outside right here just so we can kind of see what that does.

This will start bringing it, just removing some of that kind of haziness glow. You know, if I just really just kind of give it in this kind of this blue range here, this 1.6, you can kind of can see that it's not the lighting isn't adjusting as much of this color scene. I'll stick to around 2. Then again, I'm going to show you turbidity on the exterior.

I'm going to move my camera around just so you can see turbidity when I bring this out. That does provide haziness. It's a combination of atmosphere density and the haziness, so turbidity can be low.

Atmosphere density could be kind of in this in this 2 range. When I do modify an environmental within here, it automatically updates it when I click it,  so it's not going to reflect that. However, if I go to my other view, all this is different, so it kind of saves it automatically within it, but it doesn't copy it across.

Now let's get down to some of these details right here. We have ambient moon intensity and stars intensity. So ambient this affects the overall ambient lighting.

I like to set this to around 2. It's going to give it a general kind of overall lighting boost. And then moon ambient and stars intensity. These are more specific to a nighttime scene, so we can really just ignore these and leave these as is 1.5 and 1. And now let's scroll down to clouds.

And this is really more specific to an exterior scene. However, it will affect your shadows from the exterior. If you increase the amount of clouds, you're going to remove those shadows versus decreasing it.

You're really going to kind of expose this a lot more within that. So I'm going to kind of do it kind of in this mid range here or have a little bit of kind of shadows, but nothing too much. And then the next few categories, height, scale, appearance, distribution, change the cloud kind of format.

And it does affect your lighting, but they're not something that is very specific to what we're doing. It's really more focused on exterior. And in a later class, we will do more exterior renderings where we will show kind of what that looks like.

And then lastly, down here we have season. This is primarily focusing on the season for weather. If it's going to be rainy or sunny or cloudy and also trees, we can we can adjust this for the foliage.

If we want this to be in the fall time or in the winter where there's no leaves that will affect the foliage. And then same with some of these details, the brightness of the. The water, wetness, all this really kind of details, which is interesting if you do want that kind of moodier environment that you want to do within Twinmotion.

The next few options, wind, fog, ocean. These are different added elements depending on what you're seeing goes. You can add water like an ocean.

You can show where that height is at. You can add fog to your background, add wind primarily for animations. Kind of see what the trees blowing in the wind and then horizon.

This is where you can enable like this background horizon image. Whether it be kind of a countryside type thing and you can rotate around. If you're having trouble seeing it because you already have this kind of built in.

Landscape, you actually can hide this so we really just see the kind of the background here. I want to hide it here and then sync this. So yeah, that's kind of general lighting.

As we start going more into interior lights, we may refer reference back to the settings to adjust some of the exposure and the brightness, etc. As this may look a little bit too bright and too overexposed, especially in some of this. This light here, like if I was to go back into my render settings.

I can actually adjust my. My global illumination settings as well as within my camera. I can adjust my exposure and bring that down to somewhere lower, right? So there are some adjustments that we want to make.

I'll keep this back to where it was at 1.4. And I will. And then what I can do is I can apply all these same settings that I did to each of these views just by clicking. The interior view one and clicking on this media menu and copying ambience and then with each of these I can do paste ambience.

And then I can do again paste ambience and it'll apply all those same settings to each of these. I may want to go into each of these and apply some more specific adjustments as each one may be a little bit different from this one. I'm looking outside, so I may want to lessen the brightness so I can see more outside and whatnot.

The one thing that we don't have in this view is interior lighting, and that's something that is going to affect the overall scene and view of this, and that's what we're going to be discussing in the next few videos. So with that said, I will see you in the next video. Keep practicing on this.

Make sure to save your file. And I will see you in the next video.