Construction Sequence Animations

RYAN TAUBE: Hi. My name is Ryan Taube. I'm the Director of Design Technology for Clayco and the Lamar Johnson Collaborative. We're a design build firm that is active around the country. And what that means is that we have a lot of designers, project engineers, and builders that we can talk to regarding construction sequence animations. So it helps us streamline this process that we're about to show you.

So hopefully, we have some good information to share with you. And we're going to keep it simple. There's not going to be a bunch of fancy animations. We're going to have some bite-sized chunks that will help you get down the road of building your own construction sequence animations. This class is meant to navigate all the twists and turns that Revit and 3ds Max can throw at you.

We're here to help you avoid the dead ends and watch out for rabbit holes. There's a lot of really cool stuff within 3D Studio Max that you can get buried in-- gravity, and wind, and inverse kinematics. We're going to help you navigate through all of these things to get something that is efficiently done in a timely manner because with animations, the main idea is always time, the primary issue. The goal is a high quality rendering as fast as possible. And everything we come back to, it comes back to that idea.

So if you're doing a 2-minute animation, that's going to be 3,600 separate renderings at 30 frames per second. So if a rendering takes 2 minutes, that's going to take five days to render on a single computer. So how do we shorten that time? Does it need to be less than 2 minutes per render? That's ideal.

Do we need more computers? Do we need to set up a render farm? That's amazing. We have a render farm here that has 40 computers on it so we can knock out some really good renderings overnight. But you really need to think about how long it's going to take to do something.

And then, is there going to be changes? So if you're going to get some data, what do you do with it? And if you are 80% down the road, and they go back and change the schedule for the project or the design of the project, how do we set up this project to make it more efficient to go back and change that? So managing expectations, division of labor. You're probably going to have more than one person working with you.

So how do you divide the work up? How do you stay organized and communicate with everyone? The first thing you have to do is gather your inputs. So we typically receive a Gantt chart, which is a construction schedule-- when things are going to be built, from what date to what date, how long is that going to take. If you get a lot of information, you might have a poor schedule and a poor sequence or a tilt wall and a steel sequence of when things are being erected.

You're also going to be receiving models. So Revit models are great. You can even work with Rhino and SketchUp. Site logistics is another thing that comes into construction animations. So where are your fences?

Where is your tower crane going to go? Where is your lay down? Where is steel going to be put down? So we take all of this information and put it into a spreadsheet. And this spreadsheet uses formulas to automatically input the frames that something is going to take place at.

So this mass excavation starts on August 15, and it ends on November 21. What frame does that animation need to hit? And what happens if we change the frames per week? So just changing the numbers in this yellow box will change what frame something needs to happen. And I look at the light gray numbers on the left to tell me how long my animation is going to be in total-- so no more than 3,600 frames because after two minutes, people get bored.

And they lose interest in what you're doing. I try to keep it under a minute and a half. So I try to look at that number, adjust the number in yellow until I hit the number that I want. Then, you need to plan out your sequence. So typically, we're taking Revit models. We're exporting them into FPX and bringing those into 3ds Max, rendering an Arnold, and then processing in After Effects for the animations.

And that sounds very simple. But however, the reality is a lot different because we use these models for lots of different things. So these could be going into InfraWorks. They could be going into various platforms. We try to keep a single source. We also have drone data that we're putting in here.

Or we're taking site models from InfraWorks and bringing it in here. How are we showcasing this? Are we going to do this online? Is it going to be on someone's computer in MP4? Or is it going to be like this presentation in a PowerPoint?

And the reason we have this schedule is because things are always going to change. So you have to know that when something changes early on, it's got to go back and flow through all these channels. And we have to keep track of all this. So in this chart, we have for our office all of the details on what needs to happen-- what settings we need for exporting. We're going to talk about some of those here.

But we go into some good detail for our office on how to get that data to flow. So the first thing we do is, we take the Revit model. We can have the SketchUp and the Rhino model imported into this or linked in, and we slice it up. So we use scope boxes to separate each level. So every floor, every structural steel, is going to be broken up by level.

And we need that later down the road for when we need to animate it. The vertical stuff, like columns and core, those could be broken up as well using scope boxes. But typically, we would control that with the animation. So we usually leave that as one thing. And then, from that previous Excel document that we created that had all the activities across the top with different dates, we can generate all the views within Revit by using Dynamo. So we take Dynamo.

It reads the name of those things. And it generates a 3D view. And if it needs to have the different levels, we have that appended in the Excel. So if we're doing something with steel, you're going to have floors steel, core, columns, skin for each level. So if you have a 50-story building, that could be 250 views you need to generate an Revit. So doing that manually takes forever.

And so we have a Dynamo to create that automatically. Then, when we come into 3ds Max. We want to bring those in in a controlled manner. So using a a Max script, which will be in the handout that you'll receive, we can use a Max script to bring in all the FPX files at once. This script will also put each of those FPX files-- so each slab level, each structural level-- it'll put them into its own layer, which is good for visibility. It's also going to put it into its own group, which is what we're going to be animating because no one wants to animate each piece of steel.

We want to animate the entire group of steel. The first tip and trick for animation that we want to show is the slice plane. The slice plane it's kind of like the Revit scope box. It cuts a 3D geometry. And by animating that plane, we can show a slab coming in and being poured. Or we can show the steel coming in across a building or the columns rising from below, same with the core.

The nice thing with 3ds Max 2022-- it might have been in 2021-- is that you can put a cap on this. So before, it would look-- at the very beginning, here, it has an open hole that when you cut. But with a cap, it puts a solid look to it, so it doesn't look as distracting. So here's the hole. And then, when we put a cap on it, it makes it solid all the way. And you can even set a cap material that's different from the overall material.

So you can change that up, have it bright red if you want to show it coming in, or just a darker concrete to clash with the lighter concrete that's coming in. So using this technique, we can have slabs coming in, we can have columns coming up, we can have the core coming up. And we can very quickly, within a few minutes, animate an entire building. So the next trick is the keyframe offset. So having everything animate at once is how we animate it. But we want it to show sequential.

So what we do with this is, we animate the entire structure. In this case, it all comes from below or from above and drops down. So we animate one thing at a time-- or, sorry, everything at once, all as a group. So what I do is, I hit the Auto key. I just raise it up and drop it down.

So in five or six frames, everything is dropping down. Now, using another Max script-- which we'll have in the handout, or a link to, we'll talk about it-- you have to go through and select each one sequentially. So what order do you want? You can do this as a group. But then, 3ds Max is choosing the order. So if you click manually on the order you want things to happen, it will do it in that order.

So we're clicking everything. And then, we're going to run a Max script. And we're going to offset the frames. I think, in this case, it's five frames. So each action is going to happen 5 seconds after the previous action. There's a bunch of them online.

The one I use is Keyframe Tool. And then, you can always go back and adjust. So now, as you scrub through it, you'll see everything drop into place. And if you miss something, you can always go back and drag it. And so we can see it dropping into place like that. The other thing we can do is adjust that.

So we want this to align with our schedule. So when you are doing the keyframe offset, you don't have to worry about what frame it needs to start and what frame it needs to stop because down at the bottom, you can go and turn on your selection range. It'll show up right below the keyframes. And you can move the ends of it so that the end hits the frame you want and the beginning hits the frame you want. And that comes from that Excel schedule that we just created.

You can also, as things change, if the schedule changes, all you have to do is slide those frames by selecting the selection range. And you can drag that out and hit the exact points that you want. So building a quality library-- one way to become efficient is to make a library of materials. We use only seamless textures, so we don't see seams within the material itself.

And if your camera is far enough away, which usually for construction animations, it is, you can get away with just having the base color material, which will render a lot quicker. If you have to bring in other textures, it does increase render time a bit. So just be aware of that. There's also ways to finesse that and make it change as you get farther away. I would also recommend building an ADSK library.

This is good for Revit, for 3ds Max, pretty much for any Autodesk product. It creates a library of materials for you to use. We create one both for Arnold and for the scan line renderer. If you are worried about time, using the scan line renderer, you can get some really good stuff. And we're going to have the settings for a good scan line renderer in the handout as well.

So we're going to have both of those in the handout. But the scan line renderer is a lot quicker. So something that could take two minutes in Arnold might take 30 seconds using the scan line renderer. I would also recommend building a model library. So a lot of these things you can build yourself-- fences, and gates, and some cars, and pads, and job trailers. You can also purchase things.

So we have a collection of trucks and cranes that we purchased. And then, we can go through and rig those up and animate those so we can get the rotation points in the right spot so that the top of the crane is animating or the material hoist is going up and down to give some life to the rendering. So Arnold rendering basics-- typically, we are using just one light. We are using an Arnold light. It has a sky dome.

It's a sky dome type light. And then, it has a texture applied to it. And that is an HDRI texture. An HDRI texture, we'll talk about in a second. But it has a lot of lighting information. Materials, we just talked about.

We tried to build out all of our materials ahead of time so that we're not spending time on the job trying to create materials. Of course, we're always going to have to create something when needed. And if it's something useful, we'll just save it back to the library so that library grows over time. And then, you need a camera. So within 3ds Max, there is a physical camera.

It works great. I don't really change too many settings with it. You might change your aperture, and your depth of field a little bit, and a little bit of the exposure. But we'll talk about some of the settings we'll change. But generally, I just leave it out of the box. So like I mentioned earlier, the Arnold light, there's only one Arnold light.

And within that, there are different types of light that you have to choose from. You can get pretty advanced and have different lights that only come through windows. You can have a point light or a cone light. All of that is a type, kind of like a Revit type. There is a light type within Arnold.

Whereas before, each of the lights were separate. So it's really good. We choose the sky dome. We come down the color and intensity. We choose a texture. And that's where we choose the HDRI. And you can see the data here.

It knows how much light is coming in. It knows where the sun is located. So it's going to cast shadows based on that light. And because there's also lighting information in the sky and the ground-- even the buildings are casting, I guess, the absence of light. So you're going to get some shadows or darkness from that direction. And it's going to be an environment, a spherical light coming from all around.

And what this does is, it gives a really soft look to it, which is really good. It's really easy to get good lighting just using a single light. But one thing to make sure you do is change the exposure down to 0 because if you don't, it's going to overexpose your image. So cameras-- you can adjust the focal length, shutter speed, all that. You can choose a specific camera manufacturer within this.

So if you need to match a camera that you have, whether that's a drone video or even if you just want to match a hand-held Canon camera, you can have those settings ready to go, the f stop and all that. For the most part, we're not too worried about that. We're just trying to use the out of the box. We start by setting the exposure to 0. But we might need to adjust that based on our global settings.

Drones are something we also work with. So we often fly drones on all of our job sites, both for top down, trying to get survey information, but also for video animation. One tool we use is called SynthEyes And what it does is, it analyzes the drone footage. And it will generate a 3D cloud of points based on that data. And what that allows us to do is, you can create a 3D camera within 3ds Max that is camera matched to the drone.

So when you drop in the drone footage as a background to your model, it is perfectly aligned with the camera that you've created. So you can draw or input your model into a drone video and have it live on the site. And if you can find an HDRI image that matches the conditions of that day, it looks amazing. So Arnold materials, they're really easy. The standard surface is the only thing we use.

We occasionally put a color map on that. So if we need dirt, we find a seamless texture and run that into the base color map. But we can get away with just having some standard colors. So for steel, we don't find a steel material. We either make a yellow for a construction crane or we make it stand out with an orange or red.

The things we do change, there's only a few parameters. So metalness and specular roughness for the specular level. And then, transmission is how opaque it is. You can also download physically-based rendering materials, PBRs. There's lots of websites that have free PBRs that look really good.

And they work well with Arnold. So I recommend either building your own or finding some online. One thing I do recommend is to remove the Autodesk material that comes in from a Revit export. So there is an Autodesk standard material, it takes a little bit longer to render than the Arnold material or even a standard material, depending on if you're doing the scan line or Arnold.

So I recommend wiping out all the materials, applying your own materials, which is why you need a library. So try to keep it simple. There is a lot of depth in materials, as well. So this is just the top part on the right, there, of the material dialog box. You can see that there are tons of things that can be mapped to different maps or to different objects within the Arnold material library. Multi/SubObject is great.

So if you have a Revit door, for instance, it's going to export a single object but with different object IDs. So the frame will have one ID. The panel will have another ID. So build Multi/SubObjects so that you can quickly apply it to all the doors. And it's going to map all those materials to the different element IDs. Render output settings, pretty basic.

This global exposure, this is where we control the light level for the whole scene. It's why we had you set the others down to 0. It's because we want to control it through one place. It makes it very simple to control. The reason they would have other settings is because you might have multiple cameras that have a different photographic feel to it. And they want to have more control over all these various things.

We're just worried about one camera, one light. So we want to have this global control through this. I recommend it between 9 and 11 exposure value will get a decent lighting level. And to open this, the number 8 is the shortcut to open it. To save your animation, some basic settings in the Common tab, we typically do an HDTV video, so 1920 by 1080. Choose your range.

The range is important. If you have multiple computers that you want to render on, you can set a range from 0 to 100 on this computer, 101 to 200 on this computer, and save that file, and package it, and send it to different machines. If you have a render farm, all you have to do is go to that target at the top, choose distributed render, and send it to the render farm. But if you want to manually distribute it, using the range it's a great way to do that. At the bottom, change your files.

Choose a place that's common for all those computers to point to. And it's just going to dump the animations, as they finish, into that folder. The Arnold renderer tab is also pretty advanced. But you can control it with just one thing. Everything is pretty straightforward out of the box. The camera anti-aliasing, the camera AA, this is where your quality comes into play.

It controls it the fastest just by using that one dial switch. So if it's too low, if it's 1 or 2, you might get a little grainy. You'll see some of the renderings here have been a little grainy. And that's because we're trying to get things done quickly. If you need a really high-quality rendering, set this number up. It goes really high.

But 5 or 6, it depends on the amount of data you have in your animation, the number of polys that you are rendering. If you have a higher polygon count, this number needs to be higher to get a high-quality rendering. Also, with the newer Arnold renderer, you can switch between a GPU and CPU render. So if nothing is being animated, if you are just doing a fly through, the GPU is better because it's going to take all that lighting data.

And it's going to remember it for each frame. And it doesn't have to process it each time. So the GPU might take two minutes to render the first frame. And it might take 30 seconds for everything else after that. Now, as lighting conditions change, as the models move around, it might require reprocessing on each frame. So you might be a trade off.

So do some tests to see if your GPU or CPU render faster over multiple frames, not just the first frame. So post-processing-- once you've taken all of your animation and output it, we bring it into After Effects. And the reason we have that schedule way back at the beginning is because we create this text at the bottom. We animate our timeline so that the animation is behind this and going through the process that we just animated.

But we also want to show people what's going on. So if it's being active, if they're working on the third floor, if they're working on the skin, we want that to be in orange. Once it's finishing, it's green. And the black means it's all done. And some examples-- so this is a tilt-up project. We can run it again.

We animated all the walls tilting up. We can even put the structure behind that. And then, we used the keyframe offset to separate that. You can also do it with glass coming in. And then, combining it-- so as things come in. This one's a little bit sped up, so you're going to get some flicker as things start to go with the newer skin.

So this is just a really quick demonstration of how skin gets changed on this project. So they're basically just taking the skin down on one side, putting the new skin on. They really wanted to focus on how the structure above is being placed because they only had enough equipment for two sides at one time. So how do we finish one side, start the other?

At what timing does this take place? So what is being worked on? And there we go. All right. Thank you very much for your time. I look forward to any questions you guys have for me.