FormIt 360 Design Visualization Workflows

SAMUEL MACALISTER: OK. We'll probably just get started now because it's a 90-minute long class. Some of you are probably wanting to go and have some breakfast soon or maybe are still drunk from the party last night or have a severe headache. So I'll try not to talk too loud. Oh, yeah. Yeah, plenty of Red Bull. I've had my Monster drink and I got heaps of water to get my head right.

So, today's class-- they'll be about a 20-minute intro. And is everybody more keen for PowerPoint or for more live stuff? Live? I'm going to try and do everything live. And if I need to revert back to some PowerPoint videos if things go south. But I'll try and do as much as I can live. And hopefully we'll get a really good result at the end of the presentation.

So a quick update. The teams have released this format materials to Revit. And it's allowing you to now bring across your former materials into Revit without losing that connection. So this hasn't been released just yet. It is available in the Revit preview. And just to give you a quick-- just to give you a quick snapshot, with everything sort of live today. And let's turn off the music.

So this is just one of the demo data sets that I'll be using today, brought down from FormIt. And when you go and look at the materials that come down from FormIt. And you can see them here in Revit. We have here-- if you're going to be doing the preview or when this is released, you'll find that's the form of materials low through. So all of these materials that we create inside of FormIt are now available coming through into Revit. You don't need to bring in the model and then retexturize it. So that was something, just to highlight the beginning of the presentation, just to make you aware that the teams are about to bring this out.

So class summary-- we're going to be starting off with FormIt and looking at some of the presentation tools and applications, some of the new animation tools. Then moving into 3ds Max-- looking at the file formats you can export out of FormIt and you can bring in. And then finally finishing off with some InfraWorks 360.

So the four key points-- the presentation tools, the FormIt exports, how to get started using tools like 3ds Max. How many in the room have used 3ds Max before? OK, cool. And how many are using FormIt? Oh, less than Max. And how many are using InfraWorks 360? OK. So we've got a wide range. So we've got to show some of those workflows for those who haven't seen some of the other products.

So the quick starting point is the who, what, how, and why. Number one, who am I? I'm originally from New Zealand, just next to Australia. I actually live in Australia. For those of you who don't know, we're New Zealanders. If you just saw the show, Flight of the Conchords, that's where they're from. They're from Wellington. So I'm from a very far away. It's about 3:00 AM in the morning for me. I spent most of my time working as an architect over in London in the UK and a lot of health projects and AutoDesk Architectural Desktop and Revit, working for firms like HOK and Building Design Partnership.

My claim to fame at AutoDesk is I got to design the data set that ships with Revit a few years ago. This is the original one shown. When I gave it to the teams I sort of cut it down a little bit. So this one's a bit more poetic where the doors slide into the back of the house. And it's not all glazed over and there's a lot more detail on it. This one is completed with a lot of structure and some of the MEP services. So if anybody wants a copy of the original, please come see me afterwards.

And I also helped students cheat on their Revit courses. So I added the Villa Savoye exploded axonometric visual here. And what happens is a lot of students around the world reach out to me for a copy of the model so they can fast-track their way to an A. And I'm based in Sydney, Australia, which is about a 16-hour flight from here, which I'll be doing later today with my Colombian wife and my Chinese pug. Thanks.

In my spare time, I do enjoy visualization animation. So this is on my YouTube channel. This is the AutoDesk Raytracer renderer tool on the cloud. It's a Revit model linked into to Max. And using some of the basic materials and the cloud rendering engine, able to get out animation in a few hours on the cloud server. So this is still working in beta mode. But I think you can still sign up for it. But it just means, if you want to do an animation with a derivative model and then its people, you can do this very quickly.

The people from a company called Rockerbox-- they are prerigged and animated. And so you can just load 'em in and load in the rigging and then point and shoot and run the animation. So we have [? Kyle Bass ?] boogeying there on the right, trashing the apartment. And he can get this out very quickly. So I'll try and show a bi of how to do this today-- not the animated people, but we'll get close to this hopefully by the end of the class.

So number one, how many are you using a form of pro? And how many are using the free version? And how many don't know the difference between the free and the pro version? Excellent. OK. So, the main five key points for the pro version versus the free version is the AutoDesk material library. So you can make your own materials in the free version, but the pro material library comes with a lot of prefixed materials that you can reuse. And they've got the normal maps to have add texture or more bumps to the material. So they're really handy to have. There's real-time collaboration.

And this is where you can have numerous people inside the model. So I've been demoing this at universities. And we invite the students to get into the model. And they all start designing in real-time and moving around and trekking around cameras. There's solar analysis. So you start doing basic solar analysis with your conceptual designs. And there's a link to the Insight 360 service as well. So if you've got your conceptual image analysis models ready to go, you can load them up into 360. And the really cool thing is the Dynamo workspaces.

Does anybody use the Dynamo Reach and loaded in the player? So I'll try and show a bit of this live today. We also just released this with Revit 2017.1. There's a Dynamo player. So even if you're not a visual scripter, you can get the URL scripts from Dynamo Reach and load them into the player, and then run them in FormIt space or Revit 2017.1. The other one is that in the free version, it's mainly the-- well, it's all the web browser and the mobile versions. In the pro version, it's the Windows client. So if you've got heaver, more detail models, the pro version's probably better to run on the Windows client.

And how do I get it? Number one is you can click on the FormIt app and just launch it straight away on the cloud, and that will take you up. And it will polish the materials and get the space ready to get up and running. The other one is, you can get it from your respective Android and iTunes stores. And there's also the add-in for Revit. And this is for 2015, 2016, and 2017. You can buy it online.

And how many have an AEC industry collection? Just a couple. Most people still on the suites? If you move to the collection there's about 18 different software applications. So you get FormIt. You get InfraWorks 360, 3ds Max, Revit, all the flavors of AutoCAD, Navisworks and several other ones. In Australia, it's just me, myself, and I covering AEC. I've got to know them all. So I'm very familiar with the collection. And if you're an enterprise customer, you get them on TokenFlex, and you can download the desktop app from the FormIt 360 web site.

So why am I doing this? Number one, I'm a big fan of Japanese architecture. I like minimalist architecture. So I'm a fan of Tadao Ando. And he's done some stunning buildings like the Langen Foundation Art Museum. This is a little cafe by the reflecting pool. Naoshima-- this is another sort of reflecting pool.

But has anybody seen Alex Roman's, The Third and the Seventh movie? Check out Alex Roman, and you'll see this video. It's about 15 minutes long-- absolutely beautiful. And he does a lot of Japanese architecture. And this is a snapshot of some doves flying out of the reflecting pool. And the Koshino house at the very end is very big on concrete. I've heard his brother-in-law has as a precast concrete factory I think. So he specifies a lot of concrete. But he looks at things like Louis Kahn used to do with the slice of the light coming in through the building. And it's very big and bold and a lot of careful attention to scale and proportion.

And the one that we're going to be trying to do live today is the Church of Light. So the image on the left there is actually a rendering. And the one on the right is actually a photograph of the outside of the building. But we're going to try and replicate some of those in FormIt 3ds design and InfraWorks.

So these will be the three softwares. And it's going to be designing in FormIt 360 pro, rendering in 3ds Max, and animating in InfraWorks 360. And all of these come in the collection. And just a reminder for anybody who didn't see this-- you can download a QR code for your phone. And at the end I'll be bringing up some visuals. Most of them are pretty healthy. Some have some people wandering around in towels. So you'll be able to take those away with you at the end. And I've got a VR unit here if anyone wants to put their phone in stand in the space and see how good the quality is.

So, a lot of questions we are asked from customers is, why should we move to FormIt away from Sketchup? So number one is probably the reuse of the data inside of Revit. So when it comes through, you can reuse it and you apply walls to faces and floors. And then there's that new Revit materials connection with FormIt.

Interoperability-- there's so many file formats. So you can import and export. So you can reuse all your Revit RFA files, bring them into FormIt. You can bring in Sketchup files really cleanly. And a group and all the materials come through. So it's a really nice way to reuse some Sketchup data.

Cloud services-- so being able to connect to Insight 360k, and then other services by way of the interoperability. You can start to reuse some of those services to speed up your conceptual designs and present them. And of course, having it on mobile access. So when FormIt first came out it, it was on the mobile devices. A lot of my time-- I travel around Australia and New Zealand, and I was doing my designs on my iPad while I'm flying up in the cloud, on the cloud, and then syncing when I land and I'm able to have my sketch design ready to go. Oh, Q&A. Yeah, sure.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]. I just wanted to clarify the materials on this. [INAUDIBLE]? If I bring something in from Sketchup, will it bring the materials in and I can do that interactively as well?

SAMUEL MACALISTER: Ah, not Sketchup. Sketchup does go through now? Tobias, the product manager here, so, he'll be able to clarify that. But yeah, the Sketchup materials do transfer through into other applications. And I can show some of that today.

And then finally, the visual scripting, which is really popular. And if you haven't seen Dynamo, that's really cool. You don't want to be an expert. You can reuse some of the scripts, hook up the Dynamo packages and primer web sites. There's a huge amount of scripting you can get access to, and then you can load in to your chosen tool like FormIt or Revit.

So I've had enough coffee this morning to kill a small horse. That's why I may be drinking a lot of water. So the part one is designing in the format 360 pro. And this is just a quick, fast video on how easy it is to sketch design. So point and shoot, drawing a line, and then using tools like [? Switch ?] profiles to sweep along the lines.

So this is the Church of Light-- just a little building next to it. And just showing you some of the tools. I don't have time to show all of them in this presentation, because I've only got 90 minutes. But this is just a sped up one to show how easy it is to do some of the tools to push and pull, offset, extrude, and very quickly model up the building from scratch. How I do windows, just cutting the holes out.

Grouping is really important. If you haven't used FormIt thoroughly, group everything and then model geometry once it's together. There are pro materials inside the application. And then some custom materials. And Beethoven's the 9th in the background. And there's really good snapping tools as well, so you can instantly start to align whatever you extrude up or down to other parts of other buildings. And that's the quick modeling part of the application.

So moving on to the live stuff. And I'm just going to stay on that and just agree to everything, sign my life away. So I'm going to go to the desktop version of FormIt and just load in one of the finished models that I've got. And I may be cancelling out of those just to load in some other tools.

But I just wanted to show you first off the material libraries. So what you have inside of Revit, if you haven't seen this, is an add-in. And this add-in will allow you to convert data. So you can do this with both Sketchup and your RFA family files. And all you need to do is just drop all the families you want to convert into former AXM files into a folder, and then pass that to this converter file folder. And you can also sync it to your A360 Drive folder if you want to access the cloud for those files. And it will give you access to the AXM models inside of FormIt.

There's a couple of notes here in terms of the Revit categories that will be converted. So just be aware of the limitations. But it's a great way to bring across the data without having to remodel it. Now at the moment I'm not signed in, so that's why it's grayed out. So always make sure you're signed in to get access to everything you're going to need. And I'm going to have to do my sign-in here. And no one's going to see my password. That's me staring at the cloud. OK.

So now that I'm signed in, I'm going to see access to a few more services like the live sharing and the conception of engineering analysis and [? solar ?] analysis. And then these are the default libraries that you're going to get access to. So the ones that I've got available here that I've been playing around with-- some of the imported ones for the Church of Light. And if I go and drop them in, they'll come in pretty quickly off the Windows desktop client. And what you'll notice though is that they-- let me just go to my display here, and just turn off the monotone.

What you notice is they don't come in with the textures. So you can apply the textures inside of FormIt. And they come in grouped as well. So when you go to actually add up those groups, it will just give you a little warning-- any changes will be lost when converting back into the original Revit family. So just be aware if you do make adjustments to the model that there is this note here.

What we can do, though, which is really good is when you go to use some of the tools like the array-- so we just want a few copies here-- and we take these out around the model. And we go back to that original instance or one of the instances, and then edit it. And let's say we want to extrude that seat. It adjusts all of them. So it's quite nice if you've got a lot of standardization and repetition, you can bring in that family, reuse it, and then apply changes to it.

Likewise with the materials-- this is the more advanced material library that you get in the pro version. So if I want to go down to h hardwood, there's hundreds and hundreds of preset materials that I can use instantly. And I think one of the ones I liked was the beachwood whiskey. And what's happening here is that it's got like a little HDR environment lighting it. So you can instantly see the reflections and the gloss and the normal map giving it just that little bit of indentation in the timber. So it's all ready to go.

You don't really need to do too much here. And then you just paint with that material. Click once to do the face or twice to do the solid. And that's instantly updating. And very quickly you can texturize all those chair-- finish it. And now we have the texture inside the model. And you get a little bit of real-time understanding how that's going to work inside of the visual. If you do need to look at that texture, the other nice thing it does here is it groups everything together.

So if you need to look at it, you can see the two components in it. And if you need to edit that material, this is where you have the pre-built pro normal map. So there is a tool that you can make normal maps with. Has anybody heard of a tool called Crazy Bump? Sounds really cool. Unfortunately, mine isn't working right now because I just upgraded to Windows 10 and it's a little bit temperamental. I'll just see if it's going to work. No. OK.

So what that does-- it's a really simple tool. You can take a photograph of this texture here, load it Crazy Bump, and it creates the normal map for you, a diffused map. And you have bump maps and other types of maps you can use inside of visualization programs. So that's a really handy free tool to create your own custom materials. There's also cut-up maps as well. So if you want to do like alpha channels with like for the glass, for example, you can add those. And if you want to customize just the tint on the material, there's a default color here. You can start to make adjustments to that, just to get it looking a little bit lighter if it's looking a little bit dark. The scaling and horizontal and vertical are all there.

And what I would recommend is, whenever you create a material, just have a little bit of reflectivity, because everything sort of balances light around the space. And it just makes it look a little bit nicer if you add better reflections. But the pro materials are pretty good. They're ready to go. Everything's been done for you. And you don't need to create your own materials.

If you do want to create materials-- and I'm going to make sure I stick to my structure of my PowerPoint, just so I don't get lost and stay on time. If you do want to create your own materials, we have sites like this one. This is called-- I'm a little bit old now. It used to be CG Textures. Now it's called Textures.com. Has anybody heard of this? It gives you access to a lot of texture maps.

So if you want things like concrete timber, HDR skies, a lot of them you can get access to for free. You can get like 15 credits. And it's like one credit to download them. And if you're doing textures and you want to make sure they look nice and seamless-- so, where are we here? So concrete, for example, if you've got a lot of repetitive things like these concrete pavers, always look for the seamless textures, otherwise you see repetitive texture mapping inside your model.

So you can grab things like this if you're logged in. You've got 15 credits. And simply just to choose what you need. And they give you pretty good size textures. If you are doing a really large model, you want a lot detail, then you probably need the pro version to get the larger texture maps. But for FormIt, keep them quite low. You don't to be dragging across large textures into your design environment. So, yeah, simple at that. You can bring it into FormIt.

So if I go and just cut that. And if I want to do grow material from scratch-- and I'll just do a quick floor plate. If I want to create a material from scratch for example, just bring in that texture map. And I'm just going to paste that in there. I'll paste it into a proper program folder. And it brings in PNG files and JPG files, JPEG files. And if my Crazy Bump was working I'd try the normal map. But just with this, I typically add just a little bit of reflectivity, just to give it a very subtle sort of shine and, simply just paint that material on. And, oops. It's in the main sketch of course because it's grouped. Just ignore that. And then if you need to adjust it, you can go and change the scale as needed. So that's a simple way to create your own custom materials inside of FormIt.

Now I'm going to skip forward to one of the finished models. And still staying in the format we want to touch on interoperability. So here, what I've got is the Sketchup model. So there was a question about Sketchup before and how it comes through and how it goes out and all that sort of thing. So when you actually bring in those Sketchup models, they come in grouped. And they even come in with all the materials ready to go.

So this one's come in with color mapping. And I've turned the blue jeans to orange. But simply you can go and play around with these and make adjustments on the fly. I'll make that one, let's say, a transparent [? north arrow. ?] And we can change those jeans now into something a little bit interesting here. So it respects the--

[LAUGHTER]

Yeah. So it kind of respects the grouping of the materials. You can reuse it. You can change it all on the fly. And it's really nice.

Another one here is bringing in the interiors. And this interior shot is some of the scenes. The photographic people-- you can bring them across and they come through nice and clean or properly texture mapped. And we can reuse that Sketchup data.

So I definitely want to stay on time, because I practiced this last night and I was over time. So, the real-time collaboration-- so I've got this tool here. Has anybody tried real-time collaboration? It's pretty fun. I can actually collaborate with myself. So I can start a collaboration session-- start that session. And down the right here what it does is it pops-up a chat window, so you can type messages to each other. And you can see how many users you want to get in here. Tobias, is there a limit on how many users you can have? No. So I've had about 10 students who were going crazy at once on this.

So now you can see under the first user here-- and I want to go and invite others to collaborate. So you've got this link. And you can email that link. But what I found is if you just use these characters here and copy those characters, you can then fire it up in another version and use those characters to collaborate. So we'll go, OK, and we go back to the Chrome version here. And let's get out of that. And I need to make sure I'm signed in, so I can sign in on these two sessions.

And now the pro feature disappears. The other feature disappears. And now I've got access to the collaboration tool. And I can join an existing station. And I just put in the ID here. In fact, I could probably just do it-- just do it that way. And now this is loading me, myself, and I into the same session. And I can invite others if I need to. But now that should be loading it in. And is there going to be tracking? I think I was probably a bit ambitious trying it with a slightly larger model.

But what you can see here is, we're both in the same position. So I could be talking to myself and typing in stuff and then tracking around the model. I'm going to have to come back to that one. It should be following this model. But maybe I was a bit ambitious with the size of the model that I'm working on. That's a really simple way to get up and running and start working with others on the cloud, collaborating in the same model at the same time.

The other really cool thing here inside of FormIt is the scripting. So I'm just going to do a new sketch. And what I want to do inside of this-- I'm just going to close out that sharing session-- is start looking at the Dynamo player. And this is a really powerful feature. So if you go to the Dynamo Reach web site, and you log-in or sign up, you're going to get access to some of these prebuilt scripts, which you can download as the DUI in files and use inside of Dynamo, or you can just cut and paste the URL from those scripts and reuse them inside of FormIt.

If you want some really cool ones, I'd recommend on the FormIt website there's a really good blog here. So I've had clients asking about typography and the teams put together this really cool workflow on typography in FormIt 360. One of the earlier ones on the FormIt Friday Dynamo webinar is this one, which has some really good links to some of the scripts. So we have this multi-family building generator. And you sign in with your AutoDesk IDs. And it's a good thing my password's not showing because I've got unlimited cloud credits.

What this is going to be doing is it's going to be loading up this really cool script. So if you're just doing a basic masking design of a building, and you want something simple to look at the number of floors-- so we crank up the number of floors to 12. This will load the script and do it automatically for you. So really simple tools to start tweaking that design by just moving the script around. And it updates here off the cloud. So luckily the internet's pretty fast today. In Australia, a 16-hours flight from here, we don't have the speed to go to the servers in the US, so it takes us a bit longer. But here it's really fast. So I'm quite lucky to have this working for me instantly today.

The one on the main page though-- this is quite cool. I've been a big fan of Norman Foster's projects for a while after living in London. And one that I really admired was the big Gherkin building, the Swiss Re building. And I had a general components team work on that. It was very advanced. This here, you can just do it all on an Dynamo script, and then just use these adjusters for the wave in and the way to start flexing it all over the cloud. So I felt sorry for the guys who had to do all that generative component stuff, because now you've got Dynamo scripting.

So with that, how do you get into FormIt? Cut and paste, and now in the FormIt environment you just add in those Dynamo scripts. So you can add numerous scripts in there, and then just paste it in, and go OK. And this will just load in. So this is the jewel cage. And we simply just click to bring that across. And again, it's just loading the scripts from that URL. And here we have the model inside of FormIt 360.

So what's also really cool here is it comes in grouped. And if you go to the properties, there's the information about the name for the model. If you go to click and edit the group, it then brings up that script or the sliders within the script. So you can, again, just make adjustments to different items here, and just give it a sec. It goes back to the URL, and it reloads the information and starts flexing the design for you. So I thought that was really cool. And again, that's in the Revit 2017.1 release with the player. And now you have the data ready to go inside your FormIt environment.

From the website as well, you can download an SDL and a DYN file. So how many have Dynamo Studio? A couple. So if you want to publish to Dynamo Reach you need to go through Dynamo Studio to put the script up there. And for anybody else interested in getting started with Dynamo, I finally got to attend some Dynamo classes on Monday which were excellent. There's the Dynamo packages web site.

And for anybody who couldn't get to the class, it was absolutely packed. They had put up the classes on the Dynamo Package Manager website here. So they do move quite fast. But here's the AU 2016 classes. And there's some popular ones here. But if you go for the recently updated ones, you'll be able to get some of the testing data sets for you to get up and running with Dynamo and learning from some basic scripting.

So we're not at 8:30 AM, which is 3:30 AM in the morning for me. So I think I've covered most of the items here of visual scripting. And we've covered the blogs. And I'm going to drop back to the PowerPoint here just to show you just some of the visual styles. So you can find the tools either from the drop-down ribbon or over on the right here inside of the property display. So we've got all these tools for different types of graphics. And it all comes down to user of preference or what you choose to show your client at certain stages of the project.

So sometimes clients get a bit distracted by looking at materials when you're just trying to show them the spaces or the forms. So you've got tools like the monotones surface to give you this nice ambient inclusion white model. You've also got different customizations for the colors of the faces, the back faces, and the edges. And you can turn on the shadows and the ambient shadows here.

There's the edges-- so for those of you who remember the olden days when we used to do the mock-up on the drawing boards using the blue pencils before we inked it up, you can start to customize those edges, and then extend those edges, and give it kind of a graphic that you want. And for anybody who's looking at doing, say 3D printing, there's this water-type feature which allows you to pick up any holes that might be in the model. And also, you can turn on the back faces to see the back faces of things like the glass here in the model. So there's a few things that will help you with interoperability, like going out to an SDL file for a 3-D printer. You can check that the models have got watertight issues sorted.

These are sort of my preferred settings that sort of help for interiors and exteriors. I've been doing visual sort of stuff for about 20 years now. So I always try and use morning or evening lighting. It tends to give you the best shadows. And you go for the winter type suns, and that gives you the long shadows and looks a lot more seductive and gives you better contrast.

For interiors though, you're probably better turn a lot of the shadows off, just because they make it a little bit darker. Like when you get into the ambient shadows, it's like the darker lights in the corner or the spaces, and it can make the whole room a little bit darker. So I typically turn those off. However, if you do want to keep them on and keep the direct shadows, you'll get an image like this one up here, which is a little darker. You could take it on to websites like AutoDesk Pixlr, which has some fast tools to actually enhance the image or make it pop out of the screen.

So if anyone hasn't seen that-- has anybody used AutoDesk PIxlr? It's probably one of the ones that we don't market that much. But if you can get access to Photoshop like me-- the Adobe guys don't want to give me anymore free licenses. You can go to AutoDesk Pixlr, P-I-X-L-R, not Pixar. We haven't bought that one yet. AutoDesk Pixlr is free. You can download it, and you can run it off your mobile device or off your web browser.

So we've got a couple of cool ones here. There's the editor one, which pretty much has all the same sort of buttons as Photoshop. And I don't know what's going on here, but it's pretty much the same sort of thing. So you can launch that. But the fast one is launching the web app. And this will give you an opportunity to enhance the images without having to be an expert. So if I want to do this live-- and I've probably got two minutes to do this. So I'll try and do the live thing that used to take me maybe half a day to do an industry

So back in my FormIt environment, if go and open up that previous scene here-- and I'll just discard that-- and go to one of my interior views. And you can see now it's just loading up. What I love about it-- this is the location as well. It puts all the characters in Japanese for me. So this Church of Light space in Osaka, Japan. The scenes here-- so if I go to one of the interiors and I'll choose maybe this one.

And you can see here, this one in the displays has the shadows on. So it's maybe a little bit dark. You can save this out. And this is probably something just to know. You can save it out locally or to your drive. When you save it out to the image-- this is one of the new features-- you can save it out as the viewport, or you can go up to 5k, which gives you 5,000 pixels wide, which is huge. So you can get some really high resolution outputs here. I'll just do 1080, which is which is OK. And you can go up to the maximum size of 16,000 pixels.

So if you wanted to do a billboard as wide as this room, you can do it from FormIt. So we'll just export that out. And I'm just going to throw that on my desktop, on my live folder. And this is just a PNG. I prefer to work in JPEG. Pig And with that, we just browse to that from our cloud service on Pixlr. So you can open up from a URL outfall for cams. And here we have the export demo.

And what's really cool about this is, there's a lot of automated adjustments. So you can just go auto fix. And it will just do a little bit of adjustment in the color and the exposure. And then there's numerous tools to dip the field. I remember having to do this in 3ds Max when you had to do render passes and then do this real clever trick to do it in Photoshop to make it look a certain way. Now you can just do it instantly and apply it inside of AutoDesk Pixlr.

And the effects are really fast as well. Don't go too crazy with this. I always use the subtle ones. And the one I usually prefer is the [? Ingrid ?] one. And you can see what it does. It just enhances the it just makes it pop out of the screen. And you can adjust how heavily you want to apply that. So it's very subtle, but it just gives, say the concrete texture a lot more depth.

And then the final thing to do is make a quick adjustment with the brightness and the contrast just to get it looking right. So I'm just cranking that up just a little bit. And again, just keeping it really subtle. And you can get some quite good results without having to be an expert. So that's sort of a simple workflow to do it all inside a form of export.

For exteriors, I try and turn off the silhouette edges and just go for a really subtle sort of look and feel. So the more time and effort you put into your materials, you can get some really nice results. And there's this one here just has 25% of silhouettes, just to get it looking a little bit nice with the texture. Also I try and always use low shots to make the buildings seem bigger and more impressive. But usually eye height is kind of the best way to explore the building, because that's the way we experience it.

A lot of the time we like to show those axonometrics. But nobody ever gets to see the building like that, unless you're up in a building above. So try and do the low shots. And I always go for adding a lot of context, which we'll show in today's presentation. So whether you are leveraging Sketchup people or bringing in some trees, we bring it up to scale in context. So you can reuse all that data.

So what I'm going to try to do here live, is show you how to create a tree inside of 3ds Max and bring it into FormIt. And this should only take three minutes. So where's my 3ds Max? OK. So here's 3ds Max. And we'll just close out of that scene. I'll do a brand new scene. And I'm going to reset it, just so there's no smoke and mirrors. Save, yes.

Now, there's a company here called Laubwerk. They're a German company. And you can actually get access to their demo plant live view browser for free. If you want plants or trees for your own region, they've got really good packs. You can buy them for a couple hundred euros. And this gives you a really powerful tree engine. I think this is the one that I can use for my demo. So you've just got apply it. And what it does instantly is it gives you this basic graphic of a tree.

And when you go to the properties here, you can start to look at the detail of this tree in real-time. And it's got every single leaf, twig, branch, trunk that you can imagine. And it allows you to choose different variants and whether you want it to be fully grown or young or spring or winter. All of that will flick through and the tree will customize. So it's a really powerful tree generator.

The thing is, if you load this into FormIt, it may kill it. Although I have loaded in a tree like this, it just took a few minutes and I got some really good results. So what you can do with this tool, is you can reduce the polygon count by going down to [? coal ?] by level, and then just reducing this to reduce the branches. So at the moment I've just dropped it down a little. And you can see the detail branches disappear. You can also turn the leaf density down to one. and very quickly we've got a stylized winter tree.

So all I need to do from here is export. And I'm going just going to go export selected. Do it as an OBJ file. And the OBJ will carry the basic color of the tree. And again, I'm just going to throw that on my desktop here. And I've already got another tree there. Tree zero one. Everything's tree zero one. And export. And now we're ready to bring this into our formative environment. And you simply just go import tree zero one. And it should come in at the center. Just give it a second.

And again, I'm bringing it into a large model while running several programs at the same time. And let me just go to the top view. And with my trigger-- all right. Let me just do a quick new sketch. And here should be our tree coming through. Yeah. So there's the tree. It comes through grouped. And from here-- where is it? Zoom extents-- you've got a tree ready to go. It comes through grouped. And again, if you go to look at your materials, when you go to edit that group and select it-- escape, escape, escape. Yeah, this one's kind of heavy. But you can start to edit materials. Oh, it's cause I had layers on.

So, here we go. So again, it's come through as a group, like the sketch I modeled at the beginning. And you can start to edit those materials. So this one actually comes through with the color you created inside of 3ds Max. And you can have a purple tree, for instance. So that's a quick way to create a tree without having to model or go searching for Sketchup and then bring stuff in and test it. You've got the Laubwerk tree editor and you can just reduce it down. Another tip here is if you hit seven you can see the polygon count. So try and keep that really low, because the more polygons you have the heavier it's going to be and the worse the performance will be.

What did you say that German company is?

Laubwerk. And I like them because they give me a free license. And I also like them, though, because they've actually made trees for my region. So I get asked by people in New Zealand, where can I get a pohutukawa from? And the Laubwerk guys have made a native pohutukawa. And they're incredibly detailed. And there's some great tools to sort of customize it as needed. So that's a really good site. And I think I've got a slide coming up later to show you a bit more on it.

So, the final thing to a finish up here-- where are we at? 3:42 AM in the morning for me. 8:42. It's just to show the new animation features inside of FormIt. And what's really cool about this is the customization of the cameras. So here is my interior scene. And what you know is when I go to my interior scene, I've actually unchecked, include animation. And I've just got an exterior animation here.

So what you do is you have all your shots that you save here by just clicking the plus button inside the Scene Editor. And you just click on include animation, and you can play around with the transition time and the camera speed. And when you go to play it-- and this may jump a little bit just because it's pushing all this information from my card. But it will animate between camera one and camera two. And if you will pause it, it will do all sort of stuff as well.

What you can also do though, which is really cool-- I'll just make sure I stop it-- is if I go to the plan view-- and I'll just turn on the monotone surfaces, just to show you what's going on. If I go to my plan view and just turn off my shadows, and then go back to the camera, I can turn on this button here, edit scene cameras, and now it loads up the camera path.