Introduction to Twinmotion I: the model at true scale Project 1 due · Project 2 launch

10:00 · Studio Finish the flyover and turn it in

The first hour belongs to Project 1. Nothing new is taught. You finish, you render properly, and you hand it in.

1. Lock the camera

   Watch your ninety seconds once, start to finish, without touching anything. If a move lurches, fix the easing or remove a key. Do not add one.

2. Render through Movie Render Queue

   Not a viewport capture. Render the sequence, then encode with FFMPEG as we did last week. Start the render early: it is the step that takes the time.

3. Check the paperwork

   Your site's coordinates are written down in the project folder. Attribution is visible for every source you streamed. Both are deliverables, not courtesies.

4. Turn it in and back it up

   The render and the documentation go in the class share. Then copy the project folder to storage you control. We watch the flyovers together at 1:15.

11:00 · Brief Project 2, and why it starts in Twinmotion

Having flown over the real world, you now build inside it. Project 2 is a standalone house at strict 1:1, sited at true coordinates, materialled honestly and lit to a specific hour. The full brief and the precedent list are on the Projects tab.

Two tools, one foundation

Twinmotion is built on Unreal Engine. It trades Unreal's depth for speed: drag a material onto a wall, set the hour, plant a tree, and the result is on screen immediately. That is why small architecture practices design in it, and why an archviz scene starts there. When the scene needs what only the engine can do — the globe, Sequencer, Megalights, a headset — Datasmith carries it across. We take two sessions over this on purpose. Today you learn Twinmotion in a model that is already built, the Lakehouse Retreat. Next week you bring your own house in and take it through to Unreal.

1:1 or nothing

Twinmotion does not model. The modeling still happens in Blender, and the things you do not need to model — furniture, fixtures, plants, scanned surfaces — come from Fab, Epic's asset library, on the same Epic account. Twinmotion is where those pieces are assembled, checked and lit. The first question about anything that arrives, yours or Fab's, is whether it is the right size. The numbers that anchor a human-scale space: door openings around 80–90 cm wide and roughly 205 cm tall, counters near 90 cm, seat heights near 45 cm, eye height around 160–170 cm, ceilings near 2.4 m. Everyone has stood in a virtual space that felt subtly wrong, with ceilings too grand and chairs slightly toylike. That wrongness is almost always scale. Your body detects it in milliseconds even when your eyes cannot say why. So you measure before you decorate.

The drawings are the tape measure

Your house has a published plan and section. Those drawings are your evidence, the way a surveyor's notes are. Collect them with the dimensions legible, note the bay size, the slab-to-slab height and the door openings, and keep them in your project folder. The test at the Week 6 crit is that someone who knows the building should feel its proportions.

A real sun

The brief says "lit to a specific hour," and Twinmotion takes that literally. A scene has a location on the earth, a date and a time, and the sun goes where the sun would be. Choose them on purpose. You will match the same hour in Unreal next week, when the house stands on the globe.

11:30 · Guided lab First hours in Twinmotion

We follow Epic's Twinmotion Quick Start Guide together, in the scene it is written for: the Lakehouse Retreat demo that ships with Twinmotion. Everyone works in the same model, so the tool is the only new thing. The guide teaches the program; the steps we add to it teach scale and the sun. Whatever we do not reach is this week's assignment.

1. Open the Lakehouse Retreat

   Launch Twinmotion from the Epic Games Launcher, signed in with the same Epic account you use for Unreal. In the Home panel, open the Learning tab, find the Lakehouse Retreat demo scene, download it if it is not already there, and click Open. Save your own copy straight away as FMX430_TM_Lakehouse.

2. Get to know the interface

   The guide names six areas: the top bar, the header, the viewport, the panels, the docks and the footer. The library opens from the footer and media lives in a dock. Find each one once before you use any of them.

3. Learn to move

   Orbit, pan and fly first. Then switch to a walking view at eye height and go through the front door. Most decisions about a building are made from 165 cm, not from the air.

4. Add an object, then move, rotate and scale it

   Open the library from the footer, choose Objects, and drag a piece of furniture into the lakehouse. Use the gizmo to move and rotate it into place. Try the scale handle once so you know what it does, then undo it: in this course an object is the size it is.

5. Measure before you touch anything

   Use the measure tool on the lakehouse: one door opening, one floor-to-ceiling height, and the kitchen counter. Compare the numbers against the list above. A door near 85 by 205 cm and a counter near 90 cm mean the model is at true scale. Write the door measurement down; it goes in with the assignment.

6. Stand a person in the doorway

   Drag a human figure from the library into the door opening. If the person looks wrong in the door, a number is wrong. This is the check you will repeat on your own house next week.

7. Bring in one asset from Fab

   Find a chair or a table on Fab, bring it into the scene, and measure it. A seat belongs near 45 cm. Assets from a marketplace are not guaranteed to arrive at true scale, so they get the same check as your own geometry. Note the license and the creator in your process log.

8. Put the building somewhere, at some hour

   In the ambience settings, set a location, a month and a time of day. Rotate north if the model needs it. Watch the shadows move across the floor and choose an hour for a reason.

9. Two honest materials

   Drag a material from the library onto a wall or a floor, then pick it with the material picker and edit it: correct the texture scale so a plank is the width of a plank. Stop at two or three materials. The precedent houses are made of one or two.

10. One eye-level still

    In the media dock, create an image from standing height with the verticals kept vertical, then export it to your project folder. This exported image is what you turn in.

11. Back it up

    Save, then copy the Twinmotion file to storage you control.

12:30 · Workbench Practice, unhurried

No new material. You work on your own file while I circulate — this is the time where the technique from the guided lab stops being something you watched and becomes something you can do.

1. Choose your house

   Open the precedent list and settle on one. It needs a published plan and section, one or two materials, a footprint you can measure, and an address you can find on the globe. Download the drawings now.

2. If you fell behind, catch up here

   This is what the time is for. Say so and I will come to you — do not spend it quietly stuck. A flyover that is still rendering comes first.

3. If you are ahead, start the massing

   Open Blender, set the units to meters, and lay out your house's slabs and column grid from the plan. Blender Day 1, the port contract, is the forty-five minutes that makes this work.

4. Ask the AI TA anything

   The tutor on the course site is open all term for questions about how and why. It explains; you build. No agents in the work until Week 9.

1:15 · Crit / share The flyovers

We watch every Project 1 flyover on the projector. For each one: where is it, what does the camera claim about the place, and is the move legible? Then everyone names their Project 2 house and takes thirty seconds to defend the choice. We pressure-test the risky picks now, not at crit.

Week 3 assignment — Getting started with Twinmotion

Complete Epic's Twinmotion Quick Start Guide in the Lakehouse Retreat demo scene, all nine parts: open the demo, the interface, navigating the viewport, adding objects, moving, rotating and scaling them, applying a material, editing a material, creating an image, and exporting it. We start it together in the lab; you finish it on your own. Then add the three things the guide leaves out and this course cares about: measure one door opening, stand a human figure in it, and set a location, date and hour for the sun. Turn in one exported eye-level image of your lakehouse, with the door measurement and the hour you chose written in your process log. Due before Week 4.

Homework — due before Week 4

Resources

• Twinmotion Quick Start Guide — Epic's getting-started guide, written for the Lakehouse Retreat demo scene. This week's assignment.
• Twinmotion — download, documentation and tutorials. Free for students and educators.
• Designing a Tiny House in Twinmotion — Epic's own lesson plan. A good second pass at today's material.
• Fab — Epic's asset library: furniture, fixtures, vegetation and Megascans surfaces. The house is yours to model; what goes inside it can come from here.
• Blender Day 1 · The port contract — how size survives an export. Required before next week.
• Digital twins & spatial computing (2025) — this week's State of the Art reading.
• Project 1 brief — deliverables and assessment criteria for the Digital Twin Flyover.
• Project 2 brief and precedents — the Farnsworth goal, a curated list of houses with published plans, and small practices already designing in Twinmotion and Unreal. Choose your house this week.