general animation questions

[Thorsten]

Hello out there,

i have got a general question regarding high quality architectural exterior animations with vegetation, cars, furniture, people etc...

So far we did concentrate producing still images, but from time to time there are requests for animations ( in this case we have to do 5 realistic still images of a logistics hall and  additionally a camera fly from point 1 to point 5 around the building, if possible in the same quality...)

What is your experience/workflow in this case ? Which software dou you use or could you recommend for such a project?

our current software is the "classic" combination of formZ and maxwell.

Dou you have experiences with maxwell-animations ? does it work well with ranchcomputing f. ex. ?

i'm afraid of the long rendertimes, especially when i have a look on lumion or twinmnotion etc...

thanks for any thoughts.

thorsten

[Tech]

Hi Thorsten,

 

Animating with Maxwell Render will take quite a bit of time and / or computing power.  Perhaps you can simplify the vegetation and animate using RenderZone instead?  You should still be able to get high quality renders, and the render times should be a lot faster.  

 

As far as how to set up an animated camera, here is a quick summary of 3 different methods that you can use to generate animations in formZ:

 

Option 1:  Animating from keyframes:

 

Save all of the desired (keyframe) views in your Views Palette, and select them in the desired order (using  the checkmark to the right of the view name in the palette, or by graphically selecting them in the screen).  Get the Animate Entities tool and click in the screen, and select the desired options.  Click OK, and a new view will be added to the bottom of your View Palette.  Make this view Active, and then you can scrub your timeline or click the Play button see the view animate.

 

(To affect the velocity, you can either space your keyframes appropriately, or after the animation is generated, you can move the keyframes from within the Animation Timeline to adjust this as you would like.)

 

Option 2:  Keyframing a camera (view):

 

Save a view in the Views Palette and make it visible so you can see the camera.  Click on the camera with the Keyframe Tool.  Move the timeline, and then move the camera.  Move the timeline again and move the camera again if desired.  Scrub the timeline, or click Play to see the view animate.

 

Option 3:  Animating along a path:

 

Draw a 2d (open or closed) polyline or curve to serve as your animation path.  Get the Animate Along a Path tool, choose the desired options, click on a View, and then click on the path.  (When selecting these options, you may wish to select Tangent: +Z, Up Axis: +Y.)

 

NOTE that if you want to create an animation of the camera going around your objects (similar to the Turntable feature), you can do this very easily by creating the desired starting view that is centered on your objects.  Then go to a Top view and draw a circle whose center is at the Center of Interest, and whose circumference is on the Eye Point of the camera.  Go to a Side View, and Move the circle straight up so that its height is equal to that of the Eye Point.  Then simply animate the  Eye Point of the camera along this path.

 

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Note also that for both Options 2 and 3, you can Keyframe the entire camera, just the Eyepoint, just the Center of Interest, or both independently if you like.

 

Once you have previewed your animation and have everything as you would like, you can select Generate Animation from the Display Menu to save this as an animation file.  We generally recommend saving this as a FAN file with compression set to Off, or Deflate.  Once this is generated, you can use the File Menu: View File command to play back the animation.  You can then use the File Menu: Export Animation to export the FAN file to a Quicktime Movie file (MOV), to a wide variety of image file formats, or if you are on Windows, you can also export this to an AVI file.  Note that with MOV or AVI, you can select from different CODEC options, which will affect the quality and size of the resulting animation.

 

You can also right click on any tool in formZ and choose Manual to open the documentation to the appropriate page. 

 

In addition, there are many animation videos that you can find here:

 

<http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEF4E89FBDF4318F1&feature=plcp>

 

These videos are for formZ 6, but this applies 99% to the current versions of formZ.

 

Please let us know if you have any further questions.

[Tech]

(Did that help?)

[Thorsten]

thanks tech,

 

your tipps regarding animations in formz are helpful indeed.

I am not the master in creating photorealistic renderzone images, so i  was hoping to hear something like that:

 

"dont worry, there are several realtime renderengine plug-ins on the way ( like indigo, arion, octane, thea, lumion, vray rt, etc...)and  they will be integretad very soon and may help you with complex architectural animations in the near future"

 

Are there any useres with indigo, arion, thea or octane experiences regarding architectural animations ? Which one works well  in combination with formZ ?

 

Thanks,

thorsten