For many clients, being part of creating a 3D animation can very exciting, but also a bit confusing because it is not like any other process they may have encountered. It is probably closer to building a house or a machine, than shooting a video. Many clients might have experience working with creative professionals and are perhaps familier with programs like Photoshop or with video editing applications. But 3D animations are another process altogther.
A question I get asked a lot is how an animation gets "drawn" - but in 3D the "image" (24 images per second) is actually generated via a CAD file that can be viewed from any angle or perspective possible!
In Photoshop, you can never see what's behind what you start out with, let alone go inside an object in the image! With 3D animation, it's much closer to making the object (or whole environment), and then making a video of that scene. And that "scene" could be any size or scall: a machine, a building, a human artery, a single cell, or an entire solar system. Along with this scene any number of effects can be incorporated as well: energy, smoke, steam, water, heat, or cold. And if your company already has 3D engineering files of your products (for instance Solid Works, Autodesk Inventor, Pro/E, etc.) those files can be a great starting place for an animation (saving both time and money).
The other question often asked is how much something would cost given a certain length of the animation (for instance 90 seconds). That can't be answered without a lot more information. A simple scene lasting 5 minutes could cost a tenth of an extremely complicated 60 second animation. But I will give you a reasonable estimate once we've met and discussed what you are looking to do.
With all this in mind I'm going to show a simplified version of this process, taking you though one line in a script for a much larger animation (for Hamilton Storage Technologies). This shows how we go from idea, to script, to sketches and all the way through a final animation.
SHOT 18: “The single grip robot lifts plate and brings it to the barcode reader.”
Story Boards: Each primary shot, and often additional details along with it, will be hand-drawn out, scanned, and sometimes modified or colored in Photoshop. Once the full script has been boarded I package all the images into a PDF file for anyone in the decision process to view.
Scene Building: Once a scene is agreed on it is “built.” This may mean I use my 3D animation software to generate the actual objects (machine, blood cell, device, etc.) or I may have some files to import form the client. For this project, most, but not all, of the parts of the machines that were being animated came as Solid Works CAD files. These are engineering models and can be a big time and money saver especially for a complex machine. They still need a lot of preparation though and many days may be spent getting them ready to be made into a movie. This is how a scene looks while it’s “in process.” Just volume definitions of objects and a long way from our finished movie.
Animation: Once the objects have their relations set, along with virtual cameras, virtual lighting and trajectories created, we can generate a rough cut, which is called an animatic. This shows the client the basic volumes in the scene, as well as how and when they move. It’s a mini version of the movie but still very low resolution and nothing at all like the final animation in that it will have no shadows, reflections or realistic textures and lights. Animation, for a complicated scene could be days or weeks in the making, especially of it has multiple moving parts and camera moves. If more than one scene is output I will edit that together and perhaps add on-screen text, or voice-over and graphics if that’s part of the final.
Once a shot has an animatic generated, this is the best time for changes to be made, because a client sees exactly what is going to be happening and yet no real time is spent rendering the final animation. This is what an animatic would look like in general: solid objects, flat colors, outlines, but not anything like the final image in terms of quality and lighting.
Rendering is one of the most foreign concepts for clients, but this is basically where all the final magic happens for an animation. Each object in the scene is assigned realistic materials (like metals, painted surfaces, wood, glass or plastic). Light is calculated not just for shadows, but how it bounces off surfaces and goes through transparent materials like glass. Every detail that makes those CAD volumes into believable images must be calculated, and sometimes that can be for thousands of objects. And each second of an animation has twenty-four images (or frames, like a film reel) to be generated.
On this particular project, it was not uncommon for each HD frame to take 30-60 minutes to generate. I have a server room of four quad-processor machines whose only job is to generate these final images. But even with state of the art computer power, it can take days to create just thirty seconds of final animation! This is why it’s vital to do as much editing and re-working before final rendering, though of course, it is possible to make changes later. It’s just that the later it is, the more time and money it will take to make them. Like building a house, once the foundation is laid and rooms are framed, it’s a lot more complicated to change the layout! But in the end, a well-planned and executed animation is obviously worth it as you can see by this final image. A link to a full clip is below.
