Recently we had the opportunity to work with long time client Milton Roy on a fun and challenging project. The goal was to create comprehensive but as short as possible animation showing the major steps in the process of cleaning water for human consumption – and where their equipment figured into each step of the process.
Step 1, intake. The idea was to create the different steps in a modular approach to simplify working on each step individually.
The project lasted for several months and underwent many iterations as we all realized just how many important steps there were. Tremendous thought and engineering talent went into each decision regarding vital steps and equipment choices.
Great care was taken on every detail to make sure we weren’t misrepresenting anything – but also with the clear understanding this was – though technically accurate – clearly a creative interpretation of the process, not an engineering schematic.One of the ongoing challenges of technical animation is balancing accuracy and technical complexity with the need to simplify for presentation’s sake. It’s a delicate balance. On the one hand there are the brilliant, talented engineers who’ve spent sometimes years designing and perfecting their piece of the puzzle.
Several different approaches were proposed, all geared towards creating a friendly, stylized but recognizable rendition of equipment and environments. The information needed to be organized and presented in such a way to get the point across and to keep pace with contemporary communication culture. In other words, it had to be a little fun too.
On the other hand there’s the the rest of us – the non-technical audience- who’s eye glaze over when we hear the words “Excel Spreadsheet.” The challenge is to honor the integrity of engineering while presenting the value proposition and salient facts in an easily digestible and understood format.This is the ambient occlusion pass of the Chemical Feed Building 3D model, built to house various pieces of equipment involved in the clean-water process.
This project stretched organizational skills, software limits and hardware power to the max, requiring many man hours as well as many more machine hours. The end result was a presentation that succeeded on all levels and made our client look like a hero to their boss. That’s a win, and worth all the hard work that went into it.
How can CraneDigital help you communicate your difficult to understand message to your audience? We’d love to chat about it.
DOSASKID is a industrial animation marketing piece created for long-time client Milton Roy. The goal was to show how modular and complete this pre-engineered system is, featuring each major component.
To create this project we worked with the client’s CAD data sets, beginning by optimizing the 3D models created through the CAD translation process. The goal was to keep the total run time to a minute or less, so call-out copy was written and presented as succinctly as possible to be readable, yet not distracting.
Music was chosen specifically to communicate light, classy (note the orchestration) and uplifting. No voice was intended for this piece.
Final bullet copy at the end was easily added in After Effects. The whole project took two weeks from start to finish. The final piece was created both in English and Spanish.
DosaSkid from Milton Roy is a perfect use of 3D technical animation to present your product’s features and benefits. Used with permission.
One of the most powerful uses of animation is when it’s paired with live-action video. For this project CraneDigital worked closely with the team at Nutrien Ag Solutions to help launch their new product, Radiate.
More than simply live action video, more than just 3D animation, Radiate represents a unique blend of both to convey the best of this exciting new technology. Video, graphics, voice and music were all carefully selected to blend with all the important established branding striking the right tone to communicate Radiate’s core features and benefits:
Enhance early season vigor
Drive maximum root growth
Reduce stress
Maximize yield potential
Support increased profits
Root hair simulation to visualize the difference between applied vs. non-applied roots.
Where appropriate, 3D animation was created to fit specific applications – such as explaining how additional and longer root hairs on plants benefited early season growth. Or visualizing side-by-side the difference between Radiate-treated and non-treated plants.
Visualizing data using 3D graphics is more enjoyable than any spread sheet.Grower yield data shown over map of the U.S.
Radiate represents an ideal blend of live-action footage and 3D animation to powerfully communicate concepts, advantages, specific applications and value propositions in a short, sweet, compelling, uplifting way.
Motion graphics using actual photographs produced in the lab add credibility to the claims.
Those who haven’t yet considered 3D technical animation as a potential marketing solution and instead rely simply on video or photography – might benefit from this quick mention.
Exploded views are great for parts inventory, and to visualize how things fit together.
In the real world, it’s often impossible to visualize how something works. Our eyes stop at the exterior shell of the object, unable to penetrate and see what lies within.
3D Cutaways are an excellent way to explain your product’s features, benefits and value proposition.
Sometimes you don’t want to show something specific – for example, a proprietary modification you’ve made to your product. 3D Animation can easily omit whatever intellectual property or features you wish to protect.
HACH Scanning Spectrophotometer
At CraneDigital we’ve been creating 3D cut-away illustrations and animations for years. Inspired by early artists working before the computer with airbrush and traditional drawing methods, we moved to the computer to perfectly leverage size and scale relationships – and every nuance to perfectly present each object.
Ultimately, if the goal is complete flexibility in marketing, an object trapped in CAD is a bit like having built a ship in a bottle. We’re experts helping move your CAD data set to a more suitable high-quality illustration and animation environment.
This year we’ve had the privilege of working on several fun projects with several long-time repeat clients. One of them was Milton Roy Mixing, an arm of Accudyne Industries | Milton Roy.
Translating existing 3D CAD data sets into functional 3D models for animation is step one. CAD data sets can be created in many different CAD software applications. Bringing these different file formats into the animation environment requires a flexible and competent workflow.
On complex assemblies such as machines with many parts this requires patience and attention to detail. Picking through complex CAD models with hundreds or thousands of parts can be a daunting task. Grouping parts and sub assemblies according to how they’ll be animated and textured is one example of how you might organize a data set preparing it for animation.
Often times CAD assemblies will come through with every screw, nut, bolt and widget required to build it properly in the real world. Any object visible to the camera contribute to a high degree of realism. The invisible objects hidden from a given shot are dead weight – only contributing to sluggish performance – and require removal.
Another example is having to remodel portions of the object. Often times the CAD translation process creates a model made up of far more polygons than necessary. Models can be initially optimized during the translation process with software and though a good first step – is not a complete solution. Just as an example, a simple cylinder may translate into many excess points and polygons, but in reality, could be re-created as a simple primitive which is much easier for rendering engines to work with. Though this article is about using existing 3D objects – the necessity to create completely new 3D components to repair objects that didn’t translate well is part of every project. This falls under the Modeling category and will be discussed later.
One final example is large, smoothly curved surfaces (think plastic, injection-molded exterior casings). Often times what should appear smooth and perfect instead appears with creases, edges or even worse – tears in the polygonal geometry. The culprits are rogue “edges” and “smoothing angles” that did not translate well. This can be one of the most difficult things to fix, requiring identifying the offending “edge” and working to resolve the issue. Sometimes you’ll think you’ve got it perfect, then test render from different angles with different light – and sure enough, there it is. Rats!
All of this work is considered Optimizing the model for animation. It’s time consuming but worth it, the end result being a perfect 3D replica of the device properly set up to behave as it would in the real world: accept any motion, camera angle or close-up.
In animation there are always ways to work around an imperfect model, especially if you’re only viewing it from one angle. If the camera doesn’t see it, it’s not there. But in 360° degree rotations or high-resolution still images for marketing it’s impossible to hide imperfections and everything needs to be done right.
CAD translation and optimization is a core competency at CraneDigital. It takes time and attention to detail, but is absolutely necessary to ensure a high-quality project is delivered. Once complete, the model is then ready for any assignment required by the client.
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