finally playing with 2022.2 and I have to say it is stable enough to test real life projects on it.
Quick questions to start:
how to activate GI WITHOUT using patch tracing? I want to see the light emitted by an emissive material, but it won't show unless using Path tracing. PT is too slow, and we want to use the old GI effect.
How can we reset the settings to default? After some tweaking brought us to a bad look for the scene, we forget what the default values were...
What is the best way to achieve a 3D foliage material? That is, apply foliage to an object (not the 3D grass).
You should be able to use GI independently of Path Tracer, as in the screenshot below. In the Dock, under Settings > Renderer, you should see the option to enable or disable GI, next to the option to enable or disable Path Tracer.
There isn't an option to revert to default settings, but for GI, the default values are:
GI: 0.40
Distance: 150.00,
I'm not sure if I'm understanding correctly, so please correct me if this isn't what you're looking for. If you want to apply a foliage material to an object without using any of the 3D assets, there are some materials in the Ground > Nature category for grasses and dirt that can be applied to objects, and raising the Bump value for the material should give a more 3D effect. You can also use your own materials to the same effect.
Again, please let me know if I misunderstood any of your questions.
so I found the GI setting, but the emitter material does not emit with GI. I also need to click on the Path tracing renderer to see the light from the emitter material. I am pretty sure that before path tracing, GI option alone was working for emitter materials. Am I missing some settings?
Regarding the foliage, I was referring to something like Lumion foliage material, which applies 3d leaves to the faces of a material. I know how to apply a texture with green foliage; this is more like 3D leaves scattered on selected geometry. Is there a scatter tool for foliage in Twinmotion?
Another question I forgot before: is there a way to teleport to some specific location using the mouse navigation?
Regarding GI, emissive materials should still be affected by GI. If you aren't noticing any changes between GI being on and off, be sure to make sure your Effects Quality setting is set to High or Ultra, as using Medium or Low won't reflect the changes as accurately, or at all.
If the Quality settings aren't causing this, are the materials that aren't being affected by GI native to Twinmotion, or your own custom materials? If they are native to Twinmotion, let me know which materials you're using, and any settings you might have modified for the material and I can try to reproduce it. If you can also provide screenshots of the issue, that would be very helpful. If you're using custom materials, if you could share your files, which you can do by submitting a bug report and referencing this discussion post, our support team can look into this.
For foliage, I'm not very familiar with Lumion and exactly how that works, but based on your description there isn't anything like that in Twinmotion right now. The closest would be the vegetation paint and scatter tools, but these are used to apply and spread full 3d vegetation assets on surfaces, rather than just leaves. If you feel that this would make a nice addition to Twinmotion's feature set, then please feel free to submit an idea on our public roadmap describing exactly what you'd like to see. This is the best place to submit feedback, all of which is reviewed regularly.
For navigation, there isn't a way to teleport using the mouse, though you can use the keyboard shortcut F to teleport and focus on any selected item in the scene graph. If there's a different sort of teleport functionality you'd like to see that that shortcut doesn't account for, please also submit that on our roadmap for the team to review.
So this is actually normal. With Path Tracer off but GI on, you won't see emissive lighting as pronounced as with Path Tracer on, but it is still present and is much more noticeable the closer you get to the light source. With Path Tracer off, if you toggle GI on and off, you should notice that with GI off, the lighting becomes more muted. If lighting looks identical with GI off and on, then this could be a bug worth investigating further, and we would need the Twinmotion file for that. Right now, Path Tracer provides the best results due to all of the additional computations it uses to produce the render.
