Tools and Settings to Know When Starting a Project in Twinmotion for the First Time

When you first open Twinmotion, you'll see this splash screen where you have new scene, open,  home, which kind of has the latest news and feedback from what's kind of happening in the latest of Twinmotion. There are some template files here if you want to start off with a kind of a template. There's some really interesting kind of things here.

Learning, this is some really useful things where you can actually download full 3D models from various architects and projects to kind of get an understanding of what the experts are kind of doing and how they're setting up the scene, as well as a couple other of these demo scenes, Lakehouse Retreat,  and kind of this materials room, as well as some courses and some basics that you can go. If you want additional information, you don't want to hear kind of what Twinmotion has to say,  that's great. I'm going to be focusing on aspects that I have found the most useful and the best.

I'm not going to be covering 100% of everything because in my workflow, in our workflow,  we may not use everything all at the same time. Like with any software, the more you work within it, the more you learn and the better you get at it. So I want to focus on what I feel with my own expertise as the most valuable tools and elements to learn.

And additionally, there are plugins to install. So for example, if you are creating direct links,  which is essentially a plugin that allows you to link between two software, whether it be SketchUp and Twinmotion, Revit, Twinmotion, ArchiCAD, Twinmotion, etc., etc. You can actually create these direct link functionalities between the two, Rhino, Twinmotion.

So any sort of updates you do in your modeling program, i.e., Rhino, SketchUp, you can do a sync button and it'll automatically repopulate into Twinmotion. So rather than having to like re-import and do all that,  you can have this directly capabilities. So here's where you can download various plugins related to the different software.

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The beautiful thing with Revit is it already has a built-in plugin within it. You don't need to install any sort of kind of plugin because it already has it. You can kind of see right here.

Compatible with Revit with direct link functionality,  no download required for Revit 2024 or higher. Great news. So iodesk recently partnered with Twinmotion and Epic Games to create this plugin built directly into Revit.

So it's a really,  really helpful tool and it's also free and included in your Revit and Autodesk subscription. So for this case, in this course, we're going to open up just a blank new scene. When you first are here, you'll be greeted with a very simple, clean, and focused workspace.

So you'll have a few elements that pre-come in here. You can kind of see the way that the interface is organized is a large screen in the middle with your view window. On the left are your library of various tools that you want to add into your model.

You got materials, vegetation, objects, lights, HDRI environments, which is like your skies,  Megascans, which are third-party assets and plants and materials, Sketchfab, additional third-party 3D assets that others have created that you can download, additional third-party 3D objects, characters, you know, people, vehicles, additional tools, reflections,  shadow elements, and then your user library. These are elements that you've created and you currently have on your own folder. So as you open up this program, you may find that your computer may be struggling to keep up with some of the information.

It is a very advanced software,  and you're creating real-time rendering. So with that being said, is your computer is constantly processing all the information, the lights, the shadows, the textures, all in real time. If you were to go up to file and go to edit, and then preferences, you'll see here's kind of your major settings.

This is where you can update your unit system to feet if you're in the imperial system. Navigation, this kind of shows just based off of how you want to move around. You would keep them kind of more in the standard settings.

Your timestamps, graphic hardware support,  path tracer, what sort of settings you're going to be using for your path tracer. If you have multiple graphic processors on your computer, you can click this one to utilize both of them. Probes resolution, skydome resolution, grass fading, all these things.

The higher these settings go, the more intense your computer and graphic process is going to have to work. Settings for your direct link, where your textures and things like that are going to be saved at,  all these things. You can configure these settings.

I like to keep things more or less in the standard default, besides changing this to feet. Quality, this is where as you will see if you did any sort of computer gaming, you will see very similar types of settings on video games. If you are running on an extremely high powered machine, you can play it on ultra settings, which is basically what you see on the screen.

It's going to be very similar to your exported image. However,  if you're running on a normal machine with a good graphics processor, which I recommend that you follow the specs that we've outlined in the beginning of this course on what sort of computer you should be using. I recommend just keeping things on high and keeping things in this range.

This is going to give you the best kind of view in your model of what things are going to look like,  so you can accurately understand the lighting, the shadows, the textures, all of that. If you have a high powered one and you're not running any sort of buffering issues or challenges,  go with ultra, go for it. That's kind of the settings to use.

Then you go to appearance. This is basically just your general information on what your interface looks like. Interface scale, this is changing the size of these icons, and do all that.

You can lower those, bring those down, depending on how you want. Each of these little viewport windows can be dragged to make them bigger or smaller, depending on how you want to view information. Same with the bottom as well.

Once you open up some of these things, you can kind of can see that there's an ability to drag things up. Again, to reiterate, the heart of the screen is the viewport. Your live, real-time 3D canvas.

Everything you do will happen here. It's fully interactive,  lighting and shadows updated in real time. Up top here is your menu bar.

This is where you access your traditional, new, save, open, import, all these different settings, your preferences that we just went through, as well as different helps and different things to use. This element right here gives you a little bit of understanding on how to move. This thing right here is kind of stuck on here.

If you want to get rid of it, you go to settings and you can actually uncheck the twin motion or you can hide the navigational panel. As we look through it,  orbiting on your mouse is going to be the left mouse button. If you click that mouse button,  you'll essentially be orbiting around whatever you have.

If you have nothing selected, you're orbiting around big. If you select, say, this, if you select an object, now you're going to be orbiting around that object. When you think about where you want to orbit, that seems the best.

If you click down the scroll wheel and hold down the scroll wheel, you can pan,  move it around. Just like any other 3D modeling program, orbit, left mouse key, scroll wheel,  pan, and then your right mouse key is look around. You want to use a combination of the three of these things to navigate.

The other thing to notice within this is your speed. It said speed 1 through 6. If I click 1, I'm going to be zooming in really slow. If I click 6, I'll be zooming in really fast.

If I'm really far away and I want to get in close, I'm not going to be clicking 1 and then trying to scroll. It'll take forever. If I'm way far away, I'm going to zoom in at 6 until I get to this point.

Then I want to click 3 or 4 and zoom in a little bit faster. If I'm getting this close and now I'm zooming into 4, I'm going to be getting really close. Then I'll start doing 2 or 1. That's where I can start changing my speed.

That speed affects everything. It affects your zoom, which is your scroll wheel. It affects your pan, your orbit,  your look around, all those.

I constantly am having my left hand on the 1,2, 3,4, 5,6 kind of in there to constantly changing my speed and my right hand on my mouse utilizing the tools. On the right side of the screen, you will see the context panel. This changes whatever you have selected.

If you were to select these objects, this stuff will change depending on what's happening. If you click up here, this button right here is your path tracer button. This is going to do the more high powered rendering elements.

Keep in mind, I click this,  I'm now waiting for my computer to start changing the scene into path tracer. A lot of computers,  this may struggle to produce elements. This gives you a little more accurate materiality and however, as a whole new set of settings related to it.

Keep in mind that any sort of Mac, Apple computers, this path tracer is not available within it. This is your eyedropper tool. This is what you're going to be able to click to select materials.

You can select this one or this one. You can kind of see over here on the right that this setting pops up for your materials. Again, when you select an object, I can click escape on my keyboard to go back to the cursor.

If I select an object, if you click this one, this is going to allow you to move it based off of these things. This will change it to more rotation tools and this will change it into scale. You can uniform scale it from there or you can vertical scale it from there.

This right here will change local and world orientation. This will change your gizmo from going in locally into world. That's something that I rarely use, if ever, so I don't want to bother.

These two right here, if I want to change specific aspects of an object, I can do that. This is particularly relevant for when I'm uploading or importing objects from Sketchfab or Megascans, where someone else has created it. It may come in at a much larger scale than what I want.

In that case, I would want to manually scale it down. However, if I'm modeling anything ALT doing, I would do these changes in Sketchfab or Revit, not inside here. However,  rotating it for trees and objects that I import, it's a great tool to use.

Again, the right side is the context panel. Depending on what you select, this information will change. If I select a material, this information will change.

If I'm modifying a scene, the scene settings will edit here. This is your layer management setting. This is where we have the starting base, which are these essentially four objects.

You got this platform, the ball,  this is what you get in the beginning. You don't need this, you can delete this. We're not going to be going through that.

I'm going to undo that for right now. If you open up a new scene, you can just delete that. That gives you a general object to start playing around with.

On the bottom of the screen, you'll see various settings on import, modeling, materials,  populate, media, and export. In the next video, we are going to dive much more into each of these settings and what those mean.