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Industrial Animation of the Clean Water Process

by | Nov 14, 2018 | Industrial Animation | 0 comments

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.