Engagement 4k+ views

Topics Include Modeling Tools, editing geometry, editing UVs

As part of a marketing campaign for Epic Games, this video series showcases Twinmotion to Unreal Engine tutorials focused on elements in Unreal Engine that can expand projects started in Twinmotion.

This tutorial provides a glimpse into Unreal Engine’s powerful modeling capabilities and how to seamlessly edit imported Twinmotion models and geometry directly within Unreal Engine. Follow along to learn how to enhance the visuals of your scenes and discover advanced tools like Poly Edit, Bevel, and Subdivision.

Happy modeling!

Credit Epic Games

Model Epic Games

3D Environment Epic Games

Script Sam Anderson

Voiceover Sam Anderson

Editing Sam Anderson

Tools Twinmotion, Unreal Engine, Adobe Premiere, NVIDIA A6000, Atomos Ninja, Apollo Solo, RE20

Transcript

00:00 Introduction

00:51 Modeling Mode

01:36 Editing existing geometry

04:45 Creating custom geometry

06:45 Using multiple modeling tools

10:27 Conclusion

Introduction

00:00 Hello and thanks for joining this Unreal Engine tutorial. Today we will be covering some of the modeling features inside of Unreal Engine 5. The modeling mode features a robust catalog of tools and actions, but we will be focusing on some of the basic tools that can be used to edit your Twinmotion model or imported geometry.

00:26 This can be extremely helpful for making edits while you are creating your scene without going back to the original modeling solution. Today we'll be focusing on the Modeling Editor, Material Editor, and creating custom geometry. So let's dive in. To showcase this, I will be using the demo scene from Twinmotion that I have imported into Unreal Engine 5 using the Twinmotion to Unreal Engine workflow.

Modeling Mode

00:51 Now to pull up the modeling mode, I will go to the left hand side where it says Select Mode. I'll hit the drop down here, and I'm going to pull up Modeling. Two new windows will pop up. The left hand window will be a palette with all of the tools in it. The other panel will be a details box for each tool.

01:13 You'll see in the palette we have many different options, including stairs, mirror, pivot tools, merging tools, and material editors. If you'd like to learn more about each of these tools, please visit the Modeling Tools Documentation for Unreal Engine. Now to showcase one of these tools, I'm going to go ahead and take a look at the Attributes section, and we're going to be showcasing this Material Editor.

Editing existing geometry

01:36 So you'll notice that I'm unable to select this icon. And that's because I need to first select the geometry in the scene that I'd like to edit. So you'll see that I've selected this casework in the kitchen. So this all came in as one object, but you'll see that it has different materials. So those materials can be found in the Details panel.

02:03 We've got a couple of them here, but say I needed to edit or update one of these planes. So say this element here should be wood. I can edit this by going over to the Material Editor, selecting this tool. And then as I move my cursor into the scene, you'll see that a brush size pops up. that I can then use to select the triangles I'd like to edit.

02:30 So I'll go ahead and select each of these. Now, if this brush was too large or too small, I could change the size of the brush here, but this size worked for the object at hand. So now I'm going to scroll down and you'll see some of the options that we have for editing these materials. But I'm going to take a look at the materials here.

02:51 So you'll notice that these materials or index numbers are aligned to the material elements on the object. So in order to add in a new one, I'm going to hit the plus button next to Array Elements. So this is going to add in a new element down at the bottom called index six. Now let's go ahead and apply this index six to the geometry I have selected.

03:18 In order to do that, I'm going to scroll up to the top, go over to active material, And I'm going to select the element six here. Now I'll go down and I'm going to assign the active material to that selected geometry. So now that material is applied to that geometry. So as you can see, all of the elements are reading as a checkerboard UV.

03:46 That's because this is just in a working mode. As soon as I hit accept here, you'll see that all of the original materials are applied, except for the new material we created at the top. So if I scroll down to the bottom on the right hand side, you'll see that we have this element six here. So all we need to do is apply a material here.

04:07 If I wanted to apply a material in the scene, I could find one by going over to this Filter icon in the middle of the content browser and selecting Material. So here you'll see that I have the materials. inside of my Content folder. Now, if I wanted to use one of the materials already on the object, I could select the magnifying glass next to the element I'm looking for, and then drag and drop that material into element six. So now you'll see that the wood has been applied. So this can be extremely helpful for working with your Twinmotion models or imported geometry.

Creating custom geometry

04:45 But now let's take a look at how you could create some custom geometry inside of Unreal Engine. So say we would like to add on an element to this house.

04:54 So maybe a shed or outdoor shower here on the exterior. To do so, I'm going to scroll up to the top, go over to Path Extrusion, and let's take a look at some of the options we have here for creating a path. So I will be bringing this in as a Static Mesh, but you see that you also have the ability to bring it in as a Volume.

05:18 Now for the width mode, I know how thick I would like the wall to be. So I'm going to set this as Fixed and put the dimension here. It's going to be an orthogonal shape, so I'll go ahead and remove the rounded corners. And for the Extrude mode, I'm also going to set this to Fixed because I know the height that I want.

05:39 Now I could also set the material if I'm aware of this, so I'll drag and drop that in. And then I'm going to turn to the right here and you'll see a grid is in the viewport. So I'm going to use the gizmo here on the axis to move this around a bit. Now I'll start drafting out the plan of the object I'm adding.

06:01 So now when I am done with the spline, I can double click and that fixed path width will be applied. If I click again, the extrusion height will also be applied. So now I can hit complete and you'll see that it was created at the origin, which was below my deck here. So I can just bring that up. And now I'm going to bring it over to the side here.

06:26 Now it's a little short, so I can increase the size of this by using the transform tools on the right hand side. So here I'm going to go over to the Scale. and select two. Now, this is great for quickly adding in different walls, but perhaps we want to get a little more customized with our geometry. I'm going to use the same tool, but use it in combination with some of the other tools so that we can fully understand the robustness of the Modeling Tools.

Using multiple modeling tools

06:45 So in order to do that, I'll go ahead and select Path Extrusion again. Let's play around with some of these other features, so I'll have this one be interactive, I'll turn on the rounded corners, and I'm going to have this one be interactive as well. For the material, I'm going to clear out by hitting the drop down and selecting Clear.

07:19 Because I'm not sure what material I want it to be just yet. So say I want to add in a plastic molded chair here onto the deck. I'm going to use this grid to create a profile of that chair. So I'll go ahead and start mocking it up. Once I'm done, you'll see that the interactive width is now enabled. So I can select the width that I want.

07:47 Now it's giving me the option to control the rounded corners. So I'll click once again to set that. Now we have that extrusion. I'll go ahead and pick that extrusion by clicking my mouse once more, and then I'll hit Complete. Now I'm going to hit E on my keyboard to rotate this around, and W to raise it up.

08:11 Now this is quite large, so let's go ahead and change the scale in the Details panel. Okay. So that's a little more accurate here. Now say we want to soften the edges a bit. So this is kind of a harsh transition here, so one thing that we can do is add a bevel to the geometry.

08:35 So I'm going to go over to the left hand side. I'll be looking for Poly Edit, and I'm going to want to select the edge of this group. So I'm going to go over to the left hand side and make sure that Select Edge Loops and Select Edge Rings is turned on. So now I'll select those edges, and then I'm going to hit Bevel here, and if I scroll in, you'll see that we're getting a slight bevel here on the edges.

09:01 So I could increase this here to five, but I'm going to turn this down to two because I want it to just be a soft edge, maybe even one. So there we go. Now this is a very subtle change. If I wanted this to be even more rounded or organic looking, I could use additional tools here in the Modeling Tools.

09:21 This time I'm going to use the Subdivision tool, which can be found underneath Poly Model. So I'll go ahead and select Subdivision. And you'll see that it rounds it out quite nice here. So I'll go ahead and hit Accept. But you'll see that the UVs are not ideal for this object. Now I can change this by going over to the left hand side, scrolling down to UVs, selecting Project.

09:50 And now I can select what type of projection I would like to use. I can choose if I would like these to be uniform or not. So I'll go ahead and bump this up. I could rotate it or scale it as needed, but I'll go ahead and hit Accept here. Okay, so that's looking pretty nice. So now it just needs a material. So, I'll scroll through, find one that works for now, drag and drop it into the scene. And there we go.

Conclusion

10:27 So this is a very quick, simple exploration of the Modeling Tools, but I just wanted to show you how you could start to combine some of these elements to really push the boundaries of your design inside of Unreal Engine without having to go back to a original modeling solution if needed.

10:45 Now there are many, many different tools here that you could use, and you also have the ability to use Geometry Scripting. So if you have a workflow that you're using a lot to build out designs, you could use Geometry Scripting Tools to speed up that workflow. Now I won't be covering that in this tutorial but encourage you to look at the Unreal Engine Documentation to learn more. Thanks for joining this tutorial.