Creating an AVI showing phase completion

[Scott_Bloss]

I am in the process of trying to complete an animation of my project showing phase completion. The project contains approx 100 different phases. Does anyone have any experience with this? I would like to know how to get each phase to turn on during the AVI. Each phase needs to be turned on in order from start to finish.

[tonyisenhoff]

Thinking out loud here...

We use Camtasia to produce avi's. That may be a solution.

You basically record your screen. My thought is that you can lay the phases on top of each other (exactly) while your recording, Create multiple avi's, then afterwards crop out the unwanted portions. You can then produce one avi from all the smaller ones (with cool transitions between).

Check out www.techsmith.com and look under Camtasia Producer.

Don't know if that is the best way, but a possibility. Hope there is a faster way... Anyone else??

[Scott_Bloss]

Thanks tony for the input, i think we can set it up in revit as well by creating a path setting a specific number of frames like 1-100 as phase 1 aond 101-200 as phase 2 and so on, i will give it a try and let you know what happens. thanks again

[GuyR]

Thanks tony for the input, i think we can set it up in revit as well by creating a path setting a specific number of frames like 1-100

Yeah that's how I'd do it, but 100 frames per phase(4 secs video) is 10000 frames and assuming it's a reasonably complicated model is going to be a hell of a lot of rendering time.

Assuming you have a decent video-editing software.

What might be easier is to render single images from different perspectives. Create say 3 secs of video from that. Then use a transition between phases and render to avi/mpeg2. Do this for each view and it'll be much quicker than 10000 frames of rendering.

HTH,

Guy

[Scott Davis]

I think it would be nice to render stills of the different phases, and then use a video software which can pan and zoom on a still. Maybe do several views of each phase, and blend them together. Let the pan and zoom become the motion.

[hand471037]

Scott - Call Revit. Ask to speak with a guy named Ken Stowe. He has a demo I've seen that uses a journal file to script Revit to auto-output a phased animation. Using Journal files as scripts is a hack, and not something that's 100% dependable at all, but I've seen them used to do exactly what you want to do, and I know that the Revit team made that journal file. Ken didn't make it, someone else on the Revit team did, but Ken would know who to talk to.