Controlling Ambience, Lighting, and Rendering in Twinmotion

Ambience Settings

To access ambience-related controls, select "Ambience" from the Scene Graph. This panel centralizes everything from lighting and atmosphere to camera settings and rendering preferences. All tabs work together, so it’s best to experiment across the board rather than follow a strict order.

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Environment

Twinmotion offers extensive environment settings to tailor lighting and mood.

Add an HDRI

1. Open the Library on the left.
2. Navigate to HDRI Environments.
3. Drag an HDRI into the scene.

• Skydome HDRIs (found under Skies) only affect the sky and do not include surroundings.
• Other HDRIs may add forests, urban scenes, or fields to your background.

Experiment with rotation and intensity under the HDRI tab:

• Intensity directly affects the scene’s brightness and the realism of your lighting.

Weather and Fog

• Adjust Weather settings to simulate rain, snow, or season changes.
  • Note: Rain particles will not appear if the Path Tracer is active.
• Use the Height Fog slider to mask visible horizons or add atmospheric depth.

Natural Lighting

• Boost Sun Intensity to emphasize directional lighting.
• Tweak Ambient Light for overall base illumination throughout the scene.

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Camera Settings

• Turn off Auto-Exposure to take full control of scene brightness.
  • A base Exposure of 0 is a good starting point.
• Under the Lens tab, adjust:
  • Focal Length to zoom in/out
  • Enable Parallelism to make vertical lines perfectly straight—a standard in architectural visuals.

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Render Settings

• Navigate to the Render tab to choose your rendering engine:

Rendering Modes

• Real-Time: Fast and responsive—good for iterative design and walkthroughs.
• Path Tracer: Delivers high-fidelity lighting and reflections, but is slower and more demanding on hardware.

Lumen (Real-Time Enhancement)

Enable Lumen while using the Real-Time engine for more realistic lighting with minimal performance loss. It’s ideal for:

• VR
• Video walkthroughs
• Live design updates
• Less powerful computers

Effects and Clay Mode

• While Twinmotion includes FX filters, post-processing is often better handled in dedicated editing software.
• Use Clay Render to output a clean, texture-less version of your model—useful for form studies or conceptual presentations.

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Output Settings (Image Tab)

• Adjust the Render Size based on your intended use:
  • 4K for high-resolution prints or presentations.
  • 2K for faster, still-decent results.
• Enable Tiled Rendering if your system struggles with full-resolution output—this breaks the render into manageable pieces.