World structure:
The real world around us is not static, it is quite dynamic. Nothing stands still, everything changes, from hour to hour, from minute to minute. When the sun moves in the sky, it creates a whole palette of colors in the sky, as well as changes of shadows. All this greatly affects the perception of the world around us.
There is a particularly favorable moment in the sky’s mechanics when the sun makes longest shadows and soft light most pleasant to the eye. It is the time enriched with creativity and the time when most photoshoot sessions are held.
And sure thing, we are talking about sunset or a sunrise. We often suggest to all of our clients to make static renders with such lighting set ups in order to present the object in an emotional and favorable manner.
After all, the goal of using a static render is to make a potential client fall in love with your creation at a first sight.
Services:
But we do not recommend dwelling only on static, albeit very flavorful images.
Solaris17 studio offers 2 more services that will significantly expand the possibilities of visual presentation: 360 renders and animation.
As mentioned earlier, the world is constantly moving and changing, and it is natural to see it in continuous motion. And this is the reason we are enthusiastic about animation.
Animation:
The movement of an object in the frame has a very positive effect on the reading and perception of its volume. In addition, we are able to demonstrate various effects that can enhance the emotional component. For example, to make a sun’s movement time-lapse and by doing so just in a few seconds to show how shadows would move during the day. Animate the change of the depth of field from the foreground to the far end of the space. Or show a light breeze that imposingly blows any autumn foliage from trees onto the ground and so forth.
Quite important is to show the interaction of the human habitat with the future object - the movement of passers-by, cars and cyclists, children on a playground, etc.
All these elements of animation will connect the imagination of a potential buyer as close as possible to the real end result. We know very well that people make decisions based on various reasons, but positive emotions are vital, which is why at Solaris17 we pay so much attention to creative solutions when developing an animation video.
Technical challenges:
But there is another side of the coin. This is a very laborious and resource-demanding process. It's not a problem to animate all camera spans, choose the right music, and even edit ready-made cuts in After Effects. The main problem is rendering all the required frames.
We use 30 frames per second to make the video motion smoother.
To achieve this effect, we must get 30 static images on the output just for a one second video. An average video is 1.5 minutes, which equals to 90 seconds. Multiply 90 seconds by 30 frames and it gives us 2700 frames. If a customer requires ultra high quality video, and that's 4000 pixels on the larger side, that's 2700 renders in 4K resolution. It makes the head spinning.
Of course, making any edits after the final release is an expensive pleasure.
That is why we do test animation in gray materials to validate all the main elements. At this stage, edits are not a problem, within reasonable limits.
Solution to the problem:
To get the finished image in 3D, we use render packages and their light rendering algorithms work with video cards. Today, video cards are much more powerful than processors, therefore we mainly use them for video production. For animation we use Lumion and Fstorm render. The difference is Lumion is a standalone 3D package, and Fstorm is a plugin for 3ds max. In general, they are for different tasks, however this expands the range of our capabilities, which certainly gives us much more flexibility.
The main advantage of using these two options is that they just work with video cards, and we can use, as they say the in-house resources to render the animation. We do not have to relay animation rendering to render farms, which would make us dependant on third-party services, making our service more expensive.
Conclusion:
Animation is a great modern marketing tool for architectural visualization. Sometimes, 1 minute of video will replace 1000 words and arguments in favour of a particular project. And it is pretty much the case where an image is worth a thousand words.
Comments