Yet another thread about texture scaling issues from SketchUp to TwinMotion

[MagnusErstad]

Hello!

Recently started learning TM I’m having issues with texture scaling when importing a SketchUp models into TM using Datasmith Direct Link.

I believe I’m on the most current versions of SU, UE, TM and Datasmith:

SketchUp 2025 25.0.660
Unreal Engine 5.6.1
TwinMotion 2025.2
Datasmith SketchUp Exporter 5.6.101

Textures imported from SU displays fine in TM. However, replacing them with textures from the TM library often (always?) results in incorrect scaling. There are several other threads on the same issue, for example Sketchup UV Material Scales wrong - Twinmotion 2022.2 Preview 1 (and older versions) and When is the material scaling issue with Sketchup and Datasmith going to finally be resolved ?

I’ve tested a few workarounds posted in those threads and elsewhere:

• Use “Cubic UVs” in stead of “From object UV”
• Change triplanar mapping from “Off” to “World space” or “Local space”
• Manually set correct scaling
• Use photo textures, not colors

From the limited testing I’ve done, the first two options seem to work fine. Manual scaling using the scale slider does not work because the slider stops at 10 which results in the texture still being way too small. Using SU photo textures instead of colors does not matter.

I’ll demonstrate with a simple example. @wendzina has already done more testing than me so please see the other threads for more info.

How to reproduce:

• Create a blank SU model (with meters as units in my case) and draw a 1m³ cube
• Apply material “Brick_01_1K” from SU’s default Brick library
• Purge unused to remove default materials
• Import model to TM using Datasmith Direct Link (Collapse: Keep hierarchy, Full precision UVs: OFF, Full precision normals: OFF, Enable Nanite: OFF, Light settings: Use original, Enable Substitution: OFF)

Left: TwinMotion, right: SketchUp. Model imports fine. Cube has the correct dimensions. Texture from SU displays correctly on cube, but scale is clearly off on the material orb in TMs right panel.

• Substitute SU texture with TM texture “Clean brick 01”

As shown in the above gif this results in incorrect scaling.

As already mentioned, I am aware that there are workarounds. The reason I’m posting this is to bring attention to this issue so we can either get a fix or some kind of warning when doing the import. To my mind, it’s reasonable to expect that material substitution would work “right out of the box” with an integration such as Datasmith.

[MagnusErstad]

Update

Spent the last few hours poking around. Found that Datasmith does some scaling/conversions on export.

This is from the Datasmith file:

The highlighted constants are derived from the SU materials height and width multiplied by 0,0254. One inch equals 0,0254 meters.

It’s not clear to me how these constants work exactly, but setting them to 1.0 in the file resulted in the imported texture being too small.

I’m planning to use material substitution and the material substitution table does not let me specify substitution method. That means I would need to manually apply materials using Cubic UVs which totally defeats the purpose. It does however let me set scale.

So I played around with scale and found that setting it to 118 (118.11 to be exact) results in exactly the same scale as applying material with Cubic CVs. Coincidentally, 118.11 is what you get if you multiply 39.37 (number of inches in a meter) with 3.

So to recap, I think I’ve found a solution to my problem. Setting scale to 118.11 for all my materials in the substitution table seem to make all my materials scale correctly.