The Materials in the Twinmotion assets Library follow physically-based rendering (PBR) principles. Physically-based materials react to lighting and shading in the Twinmotion ecosystem, and aim to reproduce accurate and natural-looking results in all lighting environments.
When creating physically-based materials for Twinmotion, textures are added to the materials to recreate the appearance of color and other surface details. The following types of textures must be added to materials to achieve these properties: Color, Normal, Roughness, and Metallic.
Textures can be created by scanning real-world objects, or by creating them in design software such as Quixel Mixer, Adobe Photoshop, or Adobe Substance. For more information about physically-based materials and the workflows to create them, refer to The PBR Guide on the Adobe website.
Textures for Physically-Based Materials
This section provides a brief description of the Color, Normal, Roughness, and Metallic textures used in physically-based materials.
Color
The Color texture is the most basic texture and defines the base color and pattern of the material. It includes an alpha channel that can store transparency information to create an opacity mask. This can be useful to create transparency in certain parts of a material, such as for decals.
To add a Color texture to a material:
Select the material in the scene with the Material picker, or select it in the Materials dock.
In the Properties panel, go to Color > Details and click the preview image of the texture.
In the menu below the image of the texture, click Open.
Normal
The Normal texture provides surface details and creates the illusion of depth by simulating bumps, scratches, and imperfections.
To add a Normal texture to a material:
Select the material in the scene with the Material picker, or select it in the Materials dock.
In the Properties panel, go to Normal > Details and click the preview image of the texture.
In the menu below the image of the texture, click Open.
You can enhance the properties the Normal texture provides by enabling the Parallax feature and adding a Height map texture. To do so, under Normal > Details select the Parallax checkbox.
Roughness
The Roughness texture is used to determine the smoothness or roughness of a material. It is a grayscale image, where white represents roughness, and black represents reflectivity and smoothness.
To add a Roughness texture to a material:
Select the material in the scene with the Material picker, or select it in the Materials dock.
In the Properties panel, go to Roughness > Details and click the preview image of the texture.
In the menu below the image of the texture, click Open.
Metallic
The Metallic texture should be used only for materials that have metallic properties, such as aluminum, gold, silver, or alloys such as brass. The Metallic texture is a grayscale image that defines whether a material shows metallic properties. The white parts of the texture represent full metal (100%), and the black parts represent non-metal.
To add a Metallic texture to a material:
Select the material in the scene with the Material picker, or select it in the Materials dock.
In the Properties panel, go to Metallic > Details and click the preview image of the texture.
In the menu below the image of the texture, click Open.
Best Practices for Creating Textures
If you want to create your own textures, here are a few guidelines to achieve the best results.
Save your textures using the
.pngfile format. PNG is the most optimized file format for textures in Twinmotion, and for real-time rendering in general.The dimensions of your textures should be in powers of two (2), such as 512 x 512, 1024 x 1024, or 2048 x 2048 pixels.
Avoid saving textures in dimensions higher than 2048 x 2048, as this can quickly increase memory consumption in Twinmotion. Most Twinmotion native materials are in 2K resolution (2048 x 2048).
Use seamless (or tileable) textures to create a smooth continuous pattern. Otherwise you may see breaks or seams when a pattern is repeated.