Ability to import Twinmotion assets IN Skethcup?

Hey, I’m moving over from Enscape so that I can have moving models in my renderings! I work in the development industry, and we like to provide 3D models of entire neighborhoods to clients to hopefully convince approval. It’s a great tool, and even better if you can show moving cars on streets and people walking on sidewalks.

My issue is that I don’t seem to see a way to import TwinMotion assets into the Sketchup models themselves. In other words- what I’m trying to do is put furniture inside each of the houses, but I don’t want to have to do the same thing 20 times over. I see that there is a big asset library within TwinMotion, which is vast and perfectly usable for what we want to do. I just don’t want to have to furnish each house individually if that makes sense. Working within components on Sketchup allows you to edit them all at once. If there is a function that can effectively allow me to furnish a bunch of houses at once (Same floorplan/models just copied over around the site) then that would be very useful to me. If I’m not articulating well enough for this to be understood, please let me know with any questions and I’ll gladly respond.

Twinmotion is incredible at importing even heavy weight geometry that is on sketchfab and has a ton of its own great content that is customizable in the library, which is lightweight but not exportable to my knowledge. I believe many of the sketchfab models do not have any kind of like organizational structure. Some do, but most you will find are collapsed, or mostly a single group of a few objects. Even if there is a way to export from the sketchfab site (which I kind of think there might be but then there are a ton of potential attribution and licensing issues that you as the user should also be aware of or need to keep track of).

I just want to make sure you are aware that in the Scene Graph in TW, if you rick click on an object you placed from the library, most of the time you should see an option for replace object like:

image

and then you can drag in another library object. Likewise, you can do the same w/ individual geometry (usually a group or component in SU) in the scene graph in TW, and replace them with library objects. The roundtrip ability to revisit SU and keep your model as bare as possible is wonderful because you can just do the architectural, maybe some of your sitework, and “blocking” work in SU, and let TW be part of the finished product pipeline for detailed assets and visuals which frankly even with the best other rendering engines in SU, wasn’t always a wonderful experience, particularly if you were looking for photorealism or rich media.

I would suggest trying a simple sample with say one of your houses, keep it largely unfurnished in SU, and import that model to TW. Then just place the furniture inside TW. If you need to go back to Sketchup, it should just be to move a wall or fix something.

After trying it in a quick test file, I don’t know if replace is going to work for you using proxy objects unless you are aware you will have to subsequently translate them (including scales, rotations and translations) so you might be better off leaving yourself a blank canvas to drop stuff inside of TW that way it comes in at world scale and should grab the apparent ground plane. That is what I do generally unless I don’t find the right asset, then sometimes I make that in SU and just reimport.

This was a good experiment because it looks like replace does some kind of scaling calculation and sets the centerpoint of the library object with what I am assuming is the component or group’s origin from SU. Posting the images below for refrence:



There might be some hacky way to get proxy objects to behave a little more predictably, but I suspect that’s rife with caveats and not future proof. Hope that helps, but let me know if not I am curious because this is something I am curious about.