The Twinmotion Interface and Toolset for Scene Building and Visualization

Now that you're familiar with the interface and navigation,  let's take a closer look at the tools in Twinmotion and how they're organized. These tools fall into logical categories based on how we interact with the scene,  whether we're placing objects, adding materials, or preparing exports. So the next thing on down on the bottom is the import dock.

Click this. This is critical for integrating your designs from Revit, SketchUp, Rhino,  or any other software that exports FBX or OBJ. If you're using Datasmith, which is the direct link capability,  Twinmotion maintains this hierarchy of materials and geometry,  perfect for large architectural models.

If I was to click the import file here,  there are going to be multiple situations where I can import the model directly,  which is just going to place the place the 3D. It's not going to have any sort of adjustments,  like if I ever wanted to edit it and bring it in,  I would have to re-import it. Direct link is where if you had a current model open,  let's say you had a SketchUp model or you had a Revit model,  you can direct link from there.

You can import your animation files, other elements that you want. This is this is where you would do your importing. Modeling, this modeling button here,  this is going to like be able to edit different objects.

Once you click that, you can see that now there's a modeling button here,  modeling little interface,  where here is where you can actually modify some of this, these elements. And join 3D elements, you can you can flip it, reverse it,  things like that. You can do some modifications to an existing thing.

So who knows? There may be a situation where you're like,  oh man, I put this in the wrong spot. Let's me let me just do a quick little tweak here and I'll fix it,  you know, there are some tricks in some things that this may be advantageous. I personally do not use this.

And I haven't had a situation where I need to use it. Materials. This is where any sort of material that you have imported into here,  this would show up here.

If you imported a situation,  you'll be able to kind of see this whole catalog of all your all your materials and you can sort them and clean them up. Populate. This is this right here.

If you were to click, I can unclick the materials, click populate. Over here on the right, you can see that there are different options for populate. There's place, paths, and urban.

If I was a place, this is where I can paint plants or trees,  elements kind of directly onto a surface,  rather than doing the drag and drop method of the library,  which we will show later. This is how you would do paths for creating various paths for cars or people would be walking along a path. And then urban.

This is where you would add in any sort of additional context that you can get from different 3D files that they're currently have open source online. And then media. This is where you would adjust your scenes.

You can see here with media that there is a series of image,  animation, video, a sequence, a VR panorama,  a VR panorama sequence set, and a presentation,  phasing group, and configuration. In this course, we'll talk about primarily only the image options. In the later courses, we will dump into the animation and some of the VR elements.

But for this course, we're primarily going to be focusing on a static image. So once you have your image button selected and you have the view that you want,  you can click this plus and it'll automatically create an image of the specific spot. If I wanted to readjust the angle of the image,  I would just redo this, hover over the element,  see the little refresh button and click this and it'll automatically save this image in that new location.

If I was ever was like zoom out and like,  oh, I want to go back to that view,  click it and it'll jump you right back to it. So that's kind of media. That's how you organize all your elements.

And then within the image setting,  this is where you would have all of your properties related to that specific image. Properties would include the sun, the sky, clouds,  all kinds of elements directly related to that specific scene. And the next thing that we want to look at is,  again, we talked about this briefly is the scene graph.

This is your essential layer management. Any sort of object that you place into the model automatically goes here. If you were to import your SketchUp model,  direct link your Revit model,  all those layers and objects automatically fill this thing.

We want to be very cautious and organized when we do this. Otherwise, it can be a big mess. Like, for example, I like to create some subfolders.

If I was to right click into here,  I can create a new container,  which is basically a folder. And I can call these, you know, plants or trees or people. We'll dive into that in the next lessons.

But for example, in plants, I can hover over plant,  I can right click it again, and I can set active container. Now it's bold. So anything that I place now from the library would automatically go into this folder without me having to drag it into those specific folders.

So next, let's look on the left side of the library doc. This is where, again, I mentioned,  you'll find all of your assets and it's organized into categories like objects,  materials, vegetation, lights, characters, vehicles,  and even weather elements. And so all these objects are drag and drop ready.

For example, if I click vegetation and trees,  here, you can see that there's a whole list of pre saved trees. If I scroll all the way down to the bottom,  you'll see that there are additional trees,  but they require downloads. So you just need to be signed into your account in order for you to download these and you just click the little arrow button and wait for it to load and then it downloads.

And once it downloads to import any of these trees,  literally just click it, hold your left mouse button,  and drag it onto the surface. It will snap it and hover over,  basically perpendicular to any surface. If I was to place it right there along this kind of curve,  it will be perpendicular on that curve.

If I was to click and drag this Japanese maple,  it will be essentially staying perpendicular to any flat surface. However, it will snap to the elevation that you're currently dragging on. If I put this tree right here, it'll go here.

And then as you can see,  that is automatically placed it within that sub folder that I created because it was bold and highlighted. And once this is selected,  you will see that you can manipulate it in this dialog box here. So once you place an asset,  you can manipulate it using the transform tools.

And these are found at the top center of the interface up here. So you can rotate it. You can scale it.

If you scale it, you can see that it scales it uniformly,  meaning the leaves are being scaled as well. However, if you were to go into age,  this would increase the size of the tree while keeping the scale the same. So essentially, this same process is the same for all of the different libraries with various objects,  you know, chairs, things like that.

All those things are just drag and drop and they place within the corresponding. If you accidentally place it in the wrong folder,  you can also adjust these windows to pull them up and down depending on what you're using. You can actually move these around by clicking and holding with your left mouse button into a different folder or elsewhere along your scene graph.

And then down here in the bottom right are,  these are your basically toolbars. So you can actually turn these guys off. If you want this to be kind of more of your full screen aspect,  you can click library and pop that open.

You can bring in your stats. This one actually shows how your computer is running, right? Will your GPU RAM percentages using how much of that what your frame rate is, you know, 109 FPF is fairly high, right? Like you're having, you're pushing it pretty hard and then how much memory you have available. It kind of gives you a good information of how your computer is doing.

It kind of shows where all your textures are at and your meshes, how big your file is. To go over here to scene,  you could add in back in your scene graph and then your properties XYZ. This shows the position relative to the world space and you can change this relative to the relative space.

You know, I rarely look in that,  but if you need to do anything specific,  you can adjust that by typing in directly in here where you want that to be related to it. So you have a little bit more control with doing that versus just dragging it. And view sets.

This is where you have your different views on here that you can just quickly, quickly see what this looks like related to the view set. So for example, you can set up a view set that would only have specific layers that are on. Let's say I have this one, this view set with Japanese maple and I turn this off and I add another one.

Now I'll have two different view sets each with its layer states being saved. So that's a good way if you want to like flip between two different design options. One option you have this, the other option you have this.

You can quickly toggle back and forth between your different save view sets for that. Useful thing to do if you don't want to have this showed up on here,  you can just click this and it will hide. So mastering all these tools will set you up for a much better workflow.

As we go into the next lessons,  we're going to look at each of these tools in much more specific detail and understanding what each does relative to its environment and to like what different options are available or different techniques to utilize each one with. I will see you in the next video.