Engagement 5k + views

Topics Include Product Design, Fashion Design, Materials, Textures, Rendering

In collaboration with ArtStation and Twinmotion, this tutorial was created during the ArtStation Fashion Week 2023 to assist fashion designers looking to visualize their designs. Sam used existing Twinmotion templates and developed, recorded, and voiced a tutorial that takes new and experienced product users through a design workflow that includes how to output media.

Credit Epic Games

Model Epic Games

3D Environment Epic Games

Script Sam Anderson

Voiceover Sam Anderson

Editing Sam Anderson

Tools Twinmotion, OBS, Adobe Premiere, NVIDIA A6000

Transcript

Introduction

00:00 Hello and welcome to this Twinmotion tutorial. Today we will use Twinmotion’s home templates to create new design variants of the shoe you see here. Twinmotion is a visual storytelling tool that combines real-time speed, intuitive workflow and open-ended freedom to allow users of all skill levels to bring ideas to life. In this tutorial, we will give a brief introduction to the user interface in Twinmotion and then dive into applying materials using Twinmotion’s library of assets as well as creating custom materials. We will then take the finished design into a different scene to quickly produce visuals of the new design.

Getting Started

00:49 So let’s get started. To open up Twinmotion I am first going to open up the Epic Games Launcher. Now if you do not have Twinmotion downloaded you’ll first want to download the Epic Games Launcher and then you’ll want to make sure that you’re in the Unreal Engine portion here. Then go down to this drop down and select your version of choice. So I’ll be working with Twinmotion 2023.1 preview 1, as this is the version that has the latest home templates included. Now I’ll go ahead and hit Launch here. Now when you open up Twinmotion, a Home Panel will pop up. Here you will see we have a few templates here to help you get started. You could filter these by going over to Architecture or Product. Today we’ll be working with the Twinmotion shoe inside of the Worktable template and then once we are happy with the design of our shoe, we will then transfer it into the Basic Lighting template scene here. So for now, I’ll go ahead and open up that Worktable template. Now, you don’t have to start with this template, you always have the ability to create a new scene as seen with the blue button on the left of the screen.

User Interface

02:12 Okay, so now that we have our project open, let’s take a look at what’s inside. If you are opening up Twinmotion for the very first time, you may see a bar up here at the top which has some navigation tips for us. If you click the Settings cog here you will see some presets that match the navigation of a variety of different applications. You can choose what you would like to work in. I’ll go ahead and stick to the Twinmotion editor option here and I’m going to go down to the navigation panel so we have a little bit more viewport to work with. Now let’s take a moment to go through the user interface for any new users. If you go to the left-hand side and hit this arrow here, you’ll see that a library pops up. This is where we will be getting a lot of our Twinmotion materials later in the tutorial. The bottom dock down here is where you’ll be able to import any of your assets, develop the context of your scene, change any of the settings of your project, create different media, and then export that media. Now we won’t have time to dive into everything but I will cover media and exporting later on in this tutorial. Now to finish out our user interface walkthrough I’m going to go over to the right hand side and hit this arrow here. This is our Scene Graph where we will be able to see the different elements we are bringing into our scene. If I hit the drop down button for this object here and then start to click on these parts, you’ll see that it’s selecting the geometry in the scene. Now, I’m going to go ahead and turn on these additional elements here that are going to give us a few more details to work with.

Twinmotion Materials

4:02 So now that those are on, let’s take a look at the material that has been applied to the shoe. I’ll first go ahead and hide the Scene Graph so we can have more visual workspace. So in order to get that shoe material, I’ll go down to the middle of the screen and select the Material Picker. Then I will select the shoe. So you’ll see here that Clay01 Red pops up at the bottom. This is the material that’s on the shoe. If I want to see more materials that are in the project I can select this grid here and you’ll see that we have a large array of materials. The checkmark indicates that they are being used inside of the project. Now, let’s go ahead and replace this clay material with a different material. I’m going to bring up the Materials library, I’m going to go down to Fabric and I’ll scroll through to find one that I want to bring in. So I’ll drag and drop this Arrows Mesh onto my shoe. So that replaced the material for all of the geometry of the shoe and that’s because we have two different ways of applying materials inside of Twinmotion. In order to further control that, you can go down to the middle toolbar, select this icon here and you will see that you have the ability to Replace Material or Apply to Object. And now I will be able to individually edit the assets of the shoe.

Zoom Settings

5:37 Now, in order to take a look at the shoe. I’m going to scroll in using my middle scroll button on my mouse and you'll see that it’s moving at a nice pace but if I wanted to change this at all, I could go up to the eye icon on the top right hand side, go down to Speed, and select any of these options here. Now you will notice there’s also a number applied here that’s letting us know the hotkey making it easier to switch between speeds using your keyboard. So since I’m a little zoomed in, I may want to choose Inspect Speed from here on out.

Editing Materials

06:16 So now that we’re getting a little bit closer look at that material, let’s look at how we can make changes to it. So I’ll first go over to the grid to make sure that is indeed selected. And then I’m going to go over to Color to change this. When I select the paint button, a Color Picker pops up and then we also have a library of colors that I’ve gone ahead and stored here previously. So I could select one of those or I could pick my own color here. Now if I wanted to save any of these. I could go over to an empty paint bucket, select the square, and hit Store. But for now I’m going to go back to that first color I was working with and then select ok. Now we have several different setting options including roughness and scale, including a few additional ones under Settings. We won’t be covering all of these today, but I did want to bring them to your attention. So now that we’ve got one material in. Let’s go ahead and apply another one. So one thing you may notice is that some of these materials have an arrow on the right hand side of the thumbnail that is because these are assets that are stored on the cloud. If I would like to use one of these, I can hit the download button here. Now you will only need to do this for the first time you use the material in the project. If you are unable to hover over the arrow and get that white highlight there, it means you are not signed into Epic Games. You can easily sign into Epic Games by going into File, going down and making sure you’re signed in here. So now that we have downloaded this material, I’m going to drag and drop it into the scene. Now I can edit this one as well. And now I’m going to apply a few additional materials so that we are getting a design that we’re happy with. So in order to do that, I do know that I have some materials that I love to use. So I could easily search for them in the search bar. So I’ll go over to my Materials Library again, come up to the top, and I’m going to start off with microfiber. I’ll drag and drop that in. Next, I’ll search for mesh. Now when I drag and drop this one in, you’ll notice that you can actually see through the material for this one which could be great for certain designs. However, for this one, I want to go for more of an opaque material. So what I can do is go down to the bottom under Color where it says More and turn off Mask here. So now, you’re no longer seeing through the material. So I’ll go ahead and change the color for this one as well. And now I’m going to continue to populate my shoe, so next I’ll do nylon. And now I’m really just going to quickly apply different materials, so bear with me as I’m developing this shoe. Now you could easily spend some time diving into the materials to get the scale correct and get your Roughness exactly as you would like it and even edit parameters such as Normal and Parallax to add in additional details. But for now, I’ve applied a base selection of different materials to my shoe. This is looking alright but perhaps I want to take it to the next level of details. So with Twinmotion you have the ability to create your own material as well. So we’ll go ahead and spend a little bit of time to add our own materials to the stitches geometry seen here in the screen.

Custom Materials

10:13 So in order to create my own material, I’m going to go over to the grid once more and select the plus button here. So you’ll see a new material comes in. I can hit the ellipses above and rename this. Now I’m going to drag and drop it into the shoe so we can see what we are working with. I’ll zoom in a bit to take a greater look. Now we’ve been changing the color a lot here but you also have the ability to add in your own images. So if you want to pick a color you still have the ability to do so. I’ll pick Ok here, then I’m actually going to go down to this More down to the right of Color and select the text next to Texture. I’ll then hit Open and I’ll go find the image that I would like to bring in. So once I have that selected, I’ll hit Open and you’ll see that we’re getting a nice stitch around. So Twinmotion is able to read the alpha of the PNG that I used. So if I were to go to Use Mask down at the bottom and toggle that, you’ll see the difference. Now I’m going to add in a little bit more detail by going back to the stitches main material folder here, go to Settings, Normal, and I’m going to actually add in a normal map here that I have prepared. So I could spend a little bit more time finessing this material but I think it’s good for now. So I’m going to zoom out here and If I wanted to explore my shoe, I can use my right mouse button and scroll button to pan and look around the shoe in comparison to the context in the template. Now in the template, we also have a few scenarios for you that are going to allow you to take a look at your shoe or object in different lighting scenes. So those are stored in the Media tab, so I’m going to go down to the bottom left hand side and select the Media icon. Go go Image, and here we have a couple of different image and lighting scenarios that you can explore. So this template can be very helpful as you are designing your shoe. Now I’m going to move to how you can transfer assets.

User Library

12:35 So for this next portion, I'm going to show how you can take this asset you‘ve created in Twinmotion and use it in another Twinmotion Project without having to export it and import it. In order to do that, I’ll be covering the User Library. So every person has their own User Library inside of Twinmotion. You can find it by going over to the left hand side. I’m going to clear out of my search bar here. Go over to Library, and select User Library. So you’ll see that I already have a few folders in here. I could create a new folder by selecting the plus button. I’m going to right click it. Select Rename and I’ll name this one Twinmotion Shoe. Okay so now let’s add our shoe to this folder. I’m going to go over to the right hand side and expand the Scene Graph once more. And I’m going to select the parent object of my shoe that has all of the geometry included in it. I’m going to right click it and select Add to User Library. So now you’ll see that a thumbnail popped up on the left hand side, so I can drag and drop that into my folder. So now I’ll go ahead and save my project.

Basic Lighting Template

13:53 Now let’s bring up the project that we will transfer the shoe into. So to pull that home panel back up, I’m going to go up to File, Show Home Panel. Now I’ll click on Basic Lighting. Now we have this shoe that has its own set of materials and colors. A little tip for any users who want to use the stitches materials and not create something from scratch, we do have that material inside of this project template. So you’ll see if I scroll in here, I can use that material picker to select the stitches. So you could use that material here. But enough about materials, let’s switch over to the media to see what we have in this template. So I’ll go down to the bottom left hand side and select the Media icon and you’ll see we have the ability to create Images, Panoramas, Videos, Phasing which can be very helpful for storytelling and then Presentation and Panorama Sets which are very helpful for sharing your design with stakeholders. If you would like to learn more about those, I encourage you to check out our Twinmotion YouTube page where we have some tutorials exploring that. But for now, I will go ahead and go to the Image and you'll see that I can filter through a couple of different images here. Now you’ll see that the different images have different shoe entities in them. So for instance, these were getting a left and right shoe, and this image has only the right shoe. So let’s take a look at how this is working and how this is set up. If I go over to the right hand side and expand the instance here, you’ll see that as I filter through these images, different instances are visible for each image.

Replace Container Tool

15:39 The next step I will be showcasing is our Replace Container tool which will replace each shoe instance with the shoe we created. To showcase this, I’m going to work with the first image you see here and let’s go ahead and bring in our shoe. You’ll see that my User Library here is already open. I’m going to go over to my Twinmotion shoe and I’m going to drag and drop this design in. Okay so you’ll see that it's been brought in. It’s a little too close to the camera here and facing the wrong direction. So if I wanted to, I could select that top actor, and orbit the shoe here to better align with the existing shoe but the Replace Container tool will actually do this for me. So let’s go back to the Scene Graph and take a look at how that works. So these instances that we were filtering through in the images are all tied to the right shoe and left shoe placeholder here that we have inside of the template. The shoe that I have brought in is a right shoe, so what I’ll want to do is first turn on the right shoe placeholder and then I'm going to go down and select the object that I have brought in. I’ll hold Control on my keyboard, select that right shoe, right click and select Replace Container. Now it aligns my shoe and matches the transform of the shoe that was originally in the template. Now when I filter through the images at the bottom, this new shoe is applied. You may notice that the thumbnails are not accurate, that’s okay, they just need a little refresher. So I can hit this icon at the top of my image here to update those icons. So now that I have my shoe in, I’ve got some nice simple lighting already set up, good to go.

Rendering Techniques

17:38 One thing I do want to note is that I have been working in real-time raster mode this entire time. So what you see on this screen is what you get. It allows me to quickly visualize as I am working but now that I’m getting to the final stage of my design, I want to go ahead and bump up the visual quality a bit . So with Twinmotion you have the ability to render with the Path Tracer. When I click on the middle icon here, you will see that it’s calculating light a little bit differently and giving us some nicer shadows and reflections on the materials. If you are interested in learning more about Path Tracer and how you can use it, I once again encourage you to check out the Twinmotion YouTube video page where we have some videos showcasing it. Another great thing to do would be to check out the system requirements, as it does require a compatible graphics card. But with this Path Tracer I can still pan around, move around, and take a look at the detail of the shoe.

Exporting Media

18:40 But for now, we’ve got our Image01 ready to go, so let’s go ahead and export it. I’ll go down to the bottom left hand side, and select the Export icon. I’ll go over to Image where it says Empty, and then select Image 01. Then I’ll hit start Start Export.

Conclusion

19:02 So this is rounding out our tutorial today. We took the shoe from the Worktable template, added different materials, created our own material, and then transferred it into another template to quickly export an image of it. Now we know we have a lot of talented Artstation artists out there, so we would love to see the creation of the Twinmotion shoe that you produce. We encourage you to take this camera view, develop your dream Twinmotion shoe and then share it on Artstation. So that pretty much wraps it up, thank you for joining today’s tutorial.