Animating buildings...

[Chris MacDonald]

Hey guys,

 

I'm currently creating an animation of a site where we are trying to show all the various phases of development. Apparently the client is really struggling with wrapping his head around the phasing drawings, so an animation might be the best way to explain what's happening.

 

Now I don't want to go down the whole "reverse explosion" style building being built, where objects slide in from out of shot, but I would like to potentially do something that perhaps looks like the buildings are being folded/made out of paper. I also wonder if anyone knows how to animate a building so that it looks like it is being blown away like pieces of paper in the wind (as there are buildings to be demolished, as well as built)? I assume PFlow can do all of this, but I have no idea how to do it myself.

 

I suppose overall I'm looking to achieve a soft almost cartoon-like effect - so perhaps the flex modifier might be getting a fair bit of work!

 

I've seen this script that seems to do most of what I'm asking (though I'm a bit curious as to what it means by "When you buy 1 copy of the product you can use it only on 1 node." - I assume they mean workstation?).

 

Anyway, any ideas and/or tutorials would be much appreciated.

 

I'd like to avoid third party plugins as much as possible.

[Devin Johnston]

What your wanting to do is going to be very difficult without a plugin/script, it's not a simple thing to fold geometry that wasn't designed to be folded. My advice would be to do some research on 3rd party options and let your bosses know what implementing that would cost. If your client is important enough it's probably work the expense in time and money.

[Chris MacDonald]

I'm not against third party scripts, just plugins - as we'd have to buy render node licences, etc.

 

I thought this was quite a pleasant animation

 

It's worth noting that the buildings I'm looking to animate are super, super basic - we're talking massing models here... A parapet roof might be the most detail on a building. No windows or anything.

[Nicolai Bongard]

For a similar animation to the one you posted, you could probably get away with placing the pivot on the bottomn of a house, then scale the house and add a noise modifier? Do it so that the noise only affects the bottomn most part of your house. For explosions you could merely add a lot of segments to your house, split the geometry then play around with push, noise and perhaps bend modifiers while moving the geometry away along a wavy spline to make is seem like it blows away with the wind. May work out if seen from a distance. Ive not done any animation for a couple of years, so the suggestions may not work out, but at least you have some ideas to play around with.

[Chris MacDonald]

Yeah, the more I look into it, the more it appears like there's a fair amount of work in it (which is fine, I know animation isn't easy). I might settle for something equally cartoon-like, but simpler - such as having the buildings pop up through the ground, whilst scaling up/rotating, then landing in place - and made to wobble convincingly like jelly with the flex modifier. At least that way it's just about keyframing.

[Scott Schroeder]

In the video you posted, it almost looks as if they just reversed a cloth sim on the buildings. Fix the foundation verts in place and just have the building fold in on itself. Reverse the key frames or animation, and you may get there with little work.

[Ernest Burden III]

While I love the paper city animation and the look in general (there is a good example in a US pharmaceutical TV spot), is something this stylized the only answer? To show a building sequence you have options like a displayed timeline with parts fading into view--much easier to animate. Is the point just the changes over time or do you also need to show the process--staging? For example, how truck will bring in large components without blocking too much traffic? There was a great example of that using very exact BIM data that was done for the San Francisco Bay Bridge project.

[Chris MacDonald]

I don't need to show things such as that, I just need to make it more interesting than "and then this building is built... and then this one too". The phasing animation itself is very, very simple which is why I thought I could add interest via nicely animated parts.

[Francisco Penaloza]

That Animation look like something that Cinema 4D will do. actually there is a great plugin for cinema that will do exactly what you need. Kind of blow away parts. If you are a Max user, I feel sorry...

Just kidding, you could do the same actually.

As mentioned by Scott it is a cloth modifier played on reverse, you need to be sure to add some weight to the vertex so the geometry fold keeping the edges of the polygon straight, or kind of straight if not the whole thing will just deflate.

 

If you want all parts of your house to fly away I am guessing PFlow can do it, or assign splines contraits animation to the roof and walls etc, that will give you more control how they fly away, direction rotation and so on.

 

I guess assigning some dummies, you could recycle the path or control more that one house at the time.

Just random though

let us know how it goes