Grand Designs

[Anonymous]

There is an excellent UK TV show on at the moment called Grand Designs http://www.channel4.com/4homes/ontv/grand-designs/grand-designs-abroad/index.html

After a few series showing "Grand Designs" in the UK, they are off to Europe and have been recently filming in France and Spain.

There are a couple of small animations which are downloadable from their web site, that have been IMHO executed fairly well.
http://www.channel4.com/4homes/ontv/grand-designs/grand-designs-abroad/malaga-4.html

and

http://www.channel4.com/4homes/ontv/grand-designs/grand-designs-abroad/lot-4.html

I would be interested to know what others felt about the animations, as I know that in general some Archi "masters" have not recommeded using animations for presentation work.

[Anonymous]

Not beeing a master, I can recomend animation at will.
as a matter of fact, I did a workshop on the subject at Archicad University, and it went down quite well.
Been to the site, watched the "Malaga" and the "lot" movies, here is my comment:

As flythroughs go, this are one of the best i've ever seen.
This said, they pretty much suck.
You get a headache just by trying to follow the camera movements.

One golden rule, never to disobey: Don´t do flythroughs!
As for real animation, with short clips, static views, backroud music, all stitched together with a movie editor (Windows Movie Maker on XP is free and great, Imovie on Mac is also free and period), well, if you do this right - and it is not as hard as it seems - you can win your client over quite effectively.

[Anonymous]

Also, not being a Yoda master.

Don't you think the animations look like a gimmick? Attractive design but the motion, fly-thru is too game like. Emotional stills that are rendered with entourage and lighting mood effects would be much more compelling. I don't have a good (RENDERED) example to share but I did assemble a montage of images (photos) of a recent project. This type of presentation is just over 1MB and the Malaga animation was 4+.

The example linked here was created in iPhoto, simply selected a photo set and exported as QT.

http://www.burginger.com/Burginger/PatioCover.mov

[Anonymous]

I think animation is to architecture nowadays what watercolors where in the past.
It is THE media people understand. Everybody watches tv, so everybody is a video expert (watcher).
If you want to comunicate with people out there, you have to use their language.
Besides, a movie well done can transmit mood (music, scene change, ritm) much mor efectively than still images. And you get to show a LOT more about your project in a 3 min long movie than in 3 or 4 very good still renderings.
And people tend to forgive a lot of rendering errors on a movie which they find appaling on a printed image.
All in all, and talking from real experience as an architect trying to sell insubstancial ideas, movies are a superior tool.
Of course I'm not talking about flythroughs, swinging doors, swooshing elevators, passing cars and things like that. It´s all about using some well defined 50 year old guidelines for rendering your movie clips, editing and producing.

[Anonymous]

Krippahl wrote:

All in all, and talking from real experience as an architect trying to sell insubstancial ideas, movies are a superior tool.

Being that this is a graphical discussion group thread, it would be very interesting to learn by seeing. Please post links to small animations you feel hit the nail on the head.

[Anonymous]

Burginger wrote:

Krippahl wrote:

All in all, and talking from real experience as an architect trying to sell insubstancial ideas, movies are a superior tool.

Being that this is a graphical discussion group thread, it would be very interesting to learn by seeing. Please post links to small animations you feel hit the nail on the head.

I would love to post them. Unfortunately, I dont have any web page to upload them to. If you can give me a hand here, I could put a small flic I did on purpose for the workshop "better moviemaking" at ArchiCAD University this year.

[Ignacio Azpiazu]

I have some issue with the lack of user-control in movies. An architect friend says 'with animations, I feel like I am in a rollercoaster, all the time I am thinking 'how do I stop this thing'.

In that respect I think that panoramas work great: as you and the client comment aspects of the design you can slow down, look up, look around, etc. I like Artlantis better than ArchiCAD for this, both for lighting/transparence/etc. and speed.

I've been told that 'Meander' allowed linking panoramas with a sort of path-like transition between them. Which would probably be the best of both worlds (avoiding the jumping from panorama to panorama you get in Artlantis, that is).

[Anonymous]

Ignacio wrote:
I have some issue with the lack of user-control in movies. An architect friend says 'with animations, I feel like I am in a rollercoaster, all the time I am thinking 'how do I stop this thing'.

That is the problem. People hear 'animation' and think 'flythrough'.
Animation involves making small clips, with little or no camera movement, and then editing them into a coherent movie.

Besides, lack of user control works fine for us architects. Most of the time, you don't want to show everything to your client, just the bits that are most important. It was like this when we did hand painted renderings, it is so when we do animations.

[stefan]

Nobody doing realtime animation? This is suited very well for interactive walkthroughs and it is looking better and better.
With the new features for pixel shaders (supported in OpenGL en DirectX and in more and more games) this will probably be used for visualisation too.

The technology is growing fast:
- procedural multi-layer textures;
- anti-aliasing (oversampling);
- realtime reflection mapping (think of a chrome object);
- realtime shadows (not pre-rendered);
- high resolution mesh detail turned into a "normal map", so you can turn a million-polygon model into a more modest "a few thousand polygons" model (check the Unreal Engine website);
- realtime HDRI lighting.

This is all common stuff for pre-rendered animation but fairly new for interactive animation (aka "games").

[Anonymous]

Stefan,

Your message should not contain a question mark. Basically it is a statement.

"Nobody is doing real time OpenGL presentations. (period)"

I posted the thought long ago, "Can Graphisoft publish an ArchiCAD Model Viewer? Just the section with the OpenGL window, the cameras selectable, simplified navigation. This way we can just package the necessary elements up for our clients to view at their computer. Many newer computers support OpenGL. Every time I have a client in the office, they are very impressed with the OpenGL presentations done within ArchiCAD. I can only imagine what it would be like to present with the 30" Apple Display. If you swing the house around on that big monitor the client is liable to suffer from vertigo, stumble and fall down.

A few months ago I looked into the options for OpenGL presentations, never did find anything I really liked or understood. Do you know of good solutions?

Wish.