Building "construction" special FX?? help!

[JohnW3D]

Hi guys,

 

I work doing animations in the heritage industry, mainly for videos to be shown on-site in historical buildings for the sake of tourism to inform visitors. I use 3ds 2011, vray, pflow, fumeFX, rayfire etc. Something I seem to be asked to do more and more is the have buildings or objects "build up" as if they are being constructed. This is something quite common to my work as I regularly show a series of time periods where new elements are built on top of old.

 

I see this kind of effect done really nicely quite frequently, where a series of pieces pop into being and the overall effect is rather nice, as if the walls are being erected at top speed in front of your eyes. I couldn't find anything that easily with a google search to demonstrate (odd thing to try to find...wasn't sure on a good search string!) but if you guys go to:

 

http://www.redvision.co.uk/

 

and navigate to the showreel previews and take a look at "We Built this City", the second from last shot in the last perhaps 30 seconds of the preview there is something similar to what i am talking about, a bridge that kind of comes together at high speed as if it is being built (although ignore the kind of timelapse effect of the water and so on - not looking for this). I am looking to be able to do something somewhat similar (it needn't be too similar, just the overall "buildup" feel is what I am after).

 

The way I have tackled this is the past is by attaching a building into one giant object, fracturing it down into lots of irregular chunks, and using pflow to create a particle for each chunk (taking the mesh information also). So now i can just move an object of some sort through it and "trigger" the chunks to appear. The result looks as if the chunks are building up, although because I use a voronoi style fracturing, the chunks are quite irregular (I haven't found a quick way of breaking a building down into more regular blocks, and even if I did I would struggle to "trigger" regular blocks in a interesting way that made it appear to build up. The irregular nature of the fractures means I can just move say, a box through them, and I get a sort of staggered feel to the chunks appearing since they are not regular). I am not particular pleased with the results, although they are ok but I feel I could add a great deal of polish to things!

 

When I look at a lot of these FX I think "I bet most of this is done in post" but frankly I just don't know how to go about it without just having dozens of renders of the scene at various levels of "building completion" that I introduce consecutively. In my current project there are 7 time periods we are going to move through over an animation about 4 minutes long. The first 3 time periods have significant changes and I expect most of the main structures in the scene to "build up" - I can't get bogged down in incredibly complicated ways of achieving this effect as I have a *lot* of FX to generate in a short time.

 

Can anyone help?

[Scott Schroeder]

Oh no one was ever done a building creating itself animation before!

 

Sarcasm aside, look into animation key offset scripts. You simply animate one panel or beam unfolding or what have you, then use the script to apply the keys to the other objects of the same time and shift their start times say to start the animation sequence every 15 frames. It's all done with scripting. Don't forget the good ole slice modifier as well.

 

I used to work with this guy and he has a good description of how he did his animations on his Vimeo page:

(about 2 minutes into his reel)

 

When someone asked him how he did them, his reply was

 

"No plugin, just hand keyed. It's not as crazy as it sounds. I actually just select all the pieces, animate them all at once rotating and animating the visibility. Then I deselect some, offset the keys, deselect some more, offset, etc. etc.. I'm not surprised you've seen stuff like it before. About half of the animations for this year's CG Architect contest had similar animations. The first company to do it was Uniform in the UK. And then uninspired directors asked people like me to replicate it. Do I sound bitter?"

Edited December 4, 2012 by VelvetElvis