Anatomy of an Animation

With my team having completed numerous animations for Houston Metro, focusing on the Greater Houston Area, I thought it would be a good opportunity to share a breakdown of our process. Step 1: Prioritize the crucial elements. For instance, a significant challenge with large infrastructure projects is effectively communicating the changes that will most impact the community. In this case, those changes involve the streets. Some lanes are being converted, others are being modified, the road is being widened in certain areas, and medians are being added or removed in others. Therefore, we ensure that this aspect meets the client's expectations before proceeding to the next step.

Step 1: Prioritize the crucial elements.

Step 2: Block it out, including camera shots. Now we're ready to start fleshing out the scene. We start with anything that looks like it could be used as the community as a landmark. Like a University or even a chain restaurant or gas station. We typically just use cubes for residential buildings at this stage unless they stand out for some reason. As the scene starts getting filled in we task one of our animators to start blocking in the camera animations. It's important to get this done and approved by the client early, making sure everything the client wants to see will be shown. This allows us to drastically cut down workload and cost by only ever modeling what will be on scene. The blockout mesh will suffice with a texture (if needed for reflections) for anything behind the camera.

Step 2: Block it out, including camera shots.

Step 3: Make it pretty! Now we get to do the fun part, this is my favorite part of every project, when it all really starts to come together. At this stage you will also add in any textural detail that could be viewed as a landmark, like signage or murals. Sometimes you can get pretty good detail from google street view, depending on screen real estate in your animations. Luckily we are local to these locations so we travel to the sites and capture anything we need in detail.

Step 3: Make it pretty!

View Animation