200+ housing scheme campus ANIMATION!!!

[Martin P]

Anyone tried a huge campus yet? We are planning to produce an animation for a housing scheme that has 200 houses, flats, semis etc. :? :shock: ~(probably less that 50 actual models though)

I am going to strip down all the house types to the barest possible ie pretty much external only and save them as files for this purpose only, there are 9 types. I want to link these and copy them all into the correct place.

The site we will do as flat and fairly simple, with a LOT of trees. I plan to strip the tree models down to a fairly simple line impression of a tree or possibly a revolved blob shape or something.

I dont want to, but I may end up splitting it into manageable chunks. Does anyone know how revit performs with lots of trees and lots of copied linked files??

We have also considered animating as a shaded with edges or hidden line mode, then stopping at a key location and fading in a nice rendering. Or doing the whole thing as rendered, has anybody used a cylindrical backround image, and how difficult is it to add panoramic site pics (360deg) and make it look realistic, and have it all pointing in the correct directions??

Has anybody tried any of this, how well did it work? any tips you can offer would be great because I get the feeling I could end up spending a lot of time on this and want it to work!

I am going to split the animation into lets say 900 frames, and then set the 3 machines we have going from frame 1-300 and 300-600 and 600-900, then knit them together somehow. Is there any free/shareware that I can do this with?

We have got VIZ in the office, which I have never used before. Would I be quicker/easier/better to export the whole lot into viz, learn how to use some of that, and do it in there??

What a lot of questions!! :lol:
:?: :?:

[bclarch]

Although doing renderings is one of the fun aspects of Revit, this project sounds big enough and complicated enough that you might want to look into shopping it out to a graphics firm specializing in renderings and animations.

[Martin P]

Although doing renderings is one of the fun aspects of Revit, this project sounds big enough and complicated enough that you might want to look into shopping it out to a graphics firm specializing in renderings and animations.

Problem is that we dont actually have the job yet, we are tendering for it. It is a no win no fee job so obviously we wont want to go paying for anything like this. It does not have to be (and probably wont be!) superb quality, it is just going to give a feel for the overall scheme, so unfortunately the boss wants me to have a go producing this one way or the other - if it does not work we will just try something else - but I am going to have to have a go at it.........

[dna]

hey martin

i think i'll be the only person around here that has done a substantial animating, so here goes

the project i did consisted of 3 buildings pretty flat lot with lots of trees (sound familiar) the buildings were as follows: bldg A 80,000 sq.ft. 3 stories, bldg B 200,000 sq.ft. 3 stories, bldg C 40,000 sq.ft. 4 stories plus sidewalks open public spaces streetscape bus stop etcetera, i split the project into several files
bldg A
bldg B
bldg C
bus stop
bldg B courtyard

linked them all into the site.rvt file (except the courtyard one since it wasn't needed in the exterior drive by)

2 computers (both 3.2Ghz HT+2.4Gb Ram+Geforce4 128Mb[even though the video cards are pretty much useless]) + a lot of patience

3600 frames at 150dpi 720x540 pixels - 15 minutes per frame = about a month

since i had to run the majority of the animation overnight and the 2nd computer came in half way through the process it actually took 3 months

one word of caution, i tried runnning the aimation on other computers and found our 2.2Ghz+1Mb Ram will run 1 frame every 1.5 hour so gave up on that

[beegee]

2 computers (both 3.2Ghz HT+2.4Gb Ram+Geforce4 128Mb[even though the video cards are pretty much useless]) + a lot of patience

3600 frames at 150dpi 720x540 pixels - 15 minutes per frame = about a month



For most firms looking at that sort of timeframe to produce an animation is just not going to be viable. To get to the animation stage, all the design work has to be finished and the concept sketch plans, elevations and sections done, or close to.
"Client wants it yesterday" mentality is hard to overcome.
The only viable alternative would be to farm it out IMHO.

[PeterJ]

Martin

If you have to do all of this and need to do it quickly I would suggest that you do the animation in wireframe or shaded with edges and then render some really key views.

That would be much quicker, which no doubt would please Mr Armstrong if he isn't being paid for you to tinker with it.

Alternatively you could ask one of your AutoCAD colleagues to do it and run the risk of the office not winning the job!! :wink:

Either way good luck with it.

Pete

[Martin P]

it actually took 3 months


:shock: :shock: Wooooh.... I have only got until october!! I dont think it is going to be viable really. wireframe or shaded then key views rendered is going to have to be way to go I think you are right Pete! I will just have to make the trees look reasonable, you posted one I think before Peter?

BTW DNA I like the floydian avatar, have found some pretty smart windows wallpaper that has a bit of everything from each album, will post it if I can find it. Ever seen them? Saw them in Rotterdam about 9 years ago, they did a lot of the good stuff, run like hell, comfortably numb, wish you were here.......... and as for the the light show 8)

[PeterJ]

Which one's Pink?

I'm off to see, Mick, Keef et al this evening. Should be fun.

As for trees, I have posted one or two and they should be on RUGI I think. The problem I have found is making trees that look any good at all parametric. Lately I have just made types that had something that could render correctly had a generic plan symbol but nothing in elevation then I draw them in on elevations.....Its slow and steady and I don't think it's the right way as such but it works.

Witnessed the attached.

P

[Martin P]

Just watch out Pete incase you start getting strange urges to put a hand on one hip, and point into the air, while tapping your heel, and if you do keep for when you are singing in the shower before you go! :lol: :lol:

Hope you have a good night, and get a good t-shirt :)

[bclarch]

Martin,
If you have to give it a go then I have an off-the-wall suggestion to make. This is not something that I have ever tried so I have no idea if this will work or not but I'm not going to let that stop me. :)

1. Create generic house forms with just the exterior walls and roofs to match each of the different house models.
2. Render the elevations of the real houses and export the renderings. (You may have to create cropped renderings for each setback on the building.)
3. Apply the rendered elevations as decals to the generic models.
4. Render the site with the generic models inserted.

As I said, I have no idea if this will work but maybe one of the rendering gurus out there could let us know if this has any chance of succeeding.

[PeterJ]

Didn't get a tee shirt, but my father who is 65 and had a pacemaker fitted the previous week bought a bandana at the merchandise stall. I'm still in shock.

[shaunv68276]

I am used as a test site by Intel on vertical & rendering products. The latest machine being:
1. Intel Desktop board D875PBZ Performance ATX (Intel 875P Chipset)
2. Intel 3GHz\800MHZ FSB Pentium 4 w/Hyper- threading Technology
3. 1GB ddr 400 mem modules
4. 2 Seagate Barracuda SATA 120GB Raid Hard drives.
5. 128MB Titanium Geforce graphic card

I test anything from ADT 2004, Viz, 3DS max, Revit5.1, Maya. Viz absolutely cooks on this platform. Rendering times are a 3rd of what they used to be.

If you want to tackle such a large animation in Revit be my guest. Just dont give your client a completion date. My personal opinion is use software that was designed for animations, ie 3dsMax or viz. Rendering in Revit seems fine for the small office's or Residential stills. Even on such huge machine specs. the animations are 10 times slower than in Viz. plus in Viz - network rendering :D

[Martin P]

3. Apply the rendered elevations as decals to the generic models.


Hadn't thought of that one, sounds like it might really be workth a go, I hope decals work in a linked file? That would be quite adequate i think.

Re Viz etc - it did cross my mind that it would make sense, probelm being that I have never used it before :o( and the guy who worked here that did has left, so I would be kind of stuck I think, but maybe its not too hard??

[dna]

you know i actually tried the decal route

the problem with that is it looks so flat that nobody liked it, i've found that decals are only good for facades way in the distance and frames and stuff on walls

[Vincent Valentijn]

I wish you luck.. I think you're going to need it. Myself I've tried a rendering of a residential tower containing 30 apartments [only] and a single rendering with a few trees took -only :roll: - half a day on my 1,5 Ghz PC. I wouldn't dream of animating it now.. or even rendering the whole project with the 5 towers in place as I would have liked.

[Steve Jager]

We tried to do an animation with Revit on three large hotel/parking garages, linked together. It looked like it would be neat. No trees, people cars or night scenes and the buildings were are glass curtain walls.

Starting at 300 frames for the animation (shaded with no color), we tried to drive in and go around one of the hotels. It's pretty easy to set up the model and the views. A ten second model run took about ten hours of processing time on our system with no fully rendered scences. Remember,
if you want a fully rendered scene stick to daytime. If you want a completely rendered avi for 300 frames, Revit will create 300 fully rendered images to make this happen. Our simple avi file for 10 sec. for
300 frames was over 200megs!

We sent the thing out to a rendering farm, 27 computers all tied together.
It came back with sound too boot! So now we send the files out to get done. It's much more cost effective.

The short and long, if you have a simple uncomplicated project, you can probably do it as described otherwise I can recomend a better way to do this...outsource don't waste your time.