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Creating motion graphics with Sweet Home 3D
Create illusions – make gifs and presentation videos stand out – make motion design using SH3D.
1. The SIMPLE, QUICK & EASY way – make a GIF.
Use SH3D to create image files for a gif, without involving any post production ( except for a gif-maker).
The process is simple. Example: Show your new house design under different light conditions, like daytime vs night, (or show how sunlight affects shadows at different hours).
Create the interior daylight images and save the p.o.v.s, Name them alphabetically, like POV1a - POV2a and so on. Then save the project file under a different name, and change the light from daytime to night. Rename the p.o.v.s by changing POV1a to POV1b and so on… and use the Multiple photo rendering option in the PVR The same can be done for the exteriors.
Make a gif with a gif-maker. There are lots of online services. The duration and transition between the images is made in the gif-maker.
This is five images. The transitions are made when creating the gif.
Creating a “beautiful” office in twenty steps:
1. Render empty room. IMG 1 2. Add object and render again. IMG 2 3. Keep repeating this process until the objects are all added. 4. Convert the image-sequence to an animated gif with a GIF-maker. Image duration here is set to 25 fr/s.
Photoshop and Gimp can make good quality gifs, and let you add text. But there are online gif-makers that are both easier and faster. I have tried a lot of them. Some had lousy output quality, some had lousy interface, and some had both. Giphy had good quality, but as a whole it was a disappointment, I must say. The one that stood out and impressed me the most was http://gifmaker.me Some limitation in lengths, but what’s to be expected from a totally free online service? And you don’t even have to register, so they won’t sell your personal details to Indian Microsoft Imposters :)
But I didn’t want to go online for this project. What I am using for creating gifs, is a program called DaVinci Resolve – a program I have been using for years. DaVinci Resolve has a low learning-threshold for doing simpler things ( like making a gif ). At the same time it has the power to do complex tasks – things like video editing, animation, colour correction (grading), advanced graphics (VFX), automatic subtitling and text-effects, as well as offering adequate tools for sound design, including Dolby Atmos and Auro 3D. DaVinci Resolve is a must-have industry standard program for professional post-production artists. And the best thing is that it offers a completely free version, fully upgradeable, with only a few insignificant limitations vs the paid version – things that only professionals need. DaVinci Resolve is used to create magic in most major Hollywood productions. Have a look: https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve This program is highly recommended for any level of ambition in video creation. And there are plenty of tutorials on Youtube, covering any possible operation you want to perform. Runs on Mac, Linux and Windows. (No, I don’t get paid for promoting it!)
The project file is without the overlaid gif-sequence, for obvious reasons. The gif sequence, if anyone has an interest, can be found in this folder. http://boassen.no/Easing/Cat+Dog.zip The obj files, however, are extremely tiny. I didn’t know better in 2014. Better to rip them from the project file.
And for anyone interested in the mobile drawer-section with the separate drawer: http://boassen.no/Easing/MobileDrawerSection+Drawer.zip Smart people can probably convert this into a model with sliders for the drawers. I am not one of them.
Note: All objects have their anchor point (pivot) in the centre. This can not be changed. The advantage is that when resizing with keep proportions checked, the anchor point holds it in position. (Walls are not objects)
Preparing this for a gif, I have filled in 5 positions, named POV1, POV11, POV22, POV33 and POV44 All that’s left to do is to fill in the gaps – I think eleven evenly spread POVs between mine will be enough to make a passable gif. That means rendering forty four images. Well, the advantage of doing it this way, is that if some positions are “out of register”, and makes our planet wiggle, it is easy to adjust the wiggle-makers and replace them with new renderings.
The reason for presenting this useless spinning globe is this: The speediest and easiest way to make a gif out of this is to use EnkoNyito’s PVR plug-in, and then make a gif from the video. But after the last upgrade, the video renderer has changed. It can no longer do curves. (Besides, Enko has changed the Quality-bar, making it a bit more difficult to explain quality settings in HOW-TO examples – especially for new users with no reference to what Q1 – Q2, and so on, means.)
But if you haven’t yet upgraded to PVR-2.8 it is still possible to play with the project file:
I have to introduce and explain three words: Easing, Keyframe and Timeline.
Easing is a mathematical function that describes the rate at which a value changes. Easing is a way to mimic nature. Easing is one of the most valuable tools in motion design.
A timeline is an overview where all the frames of a video or film are laid out side by side. Without a timeline it is impossible to edit a video.
In my video there are thirty frames per second. That gives me a timeline with 1800 frames pr. min. 1800 places where I can add instructions. Several keyframes can be entered at the same frame. When I want something to happen at a particular time in my video, I can place one or several keyframes on the timeline, and give them tasks and values. F.i. to fade in a title, I start with a keyframe saying: Opacity=0. The title will then be invisible. If I add a new keyframe 30 frames later saying: Opacity=100, the title will fade in from invisible to 100% opaque within that second. The title will then be visible until I add the two keyframes in the reversed order to make it invisible. The reason it does not jump from invisible to opaque after one second, is because the program automatically adds “tweens”. Tweens ( or in-betweens ) means that every frame between two keyframes automatically get a linear increase from zero to 100 %.
The same goes for movement.
To create movement, I can enter a keyframe on the timeline. The first entry is telling the program the position coordinates for where the object I want to move shall start moving. Then I go to the next position on the timeline, the spot where I want the movement to end. I enter a new keyframe with position coordinates. The object will then automatically be moved at a constant speed between the two keyframes.
Natural motion starts with acceleration, and ends with deceleration. In animation software, different formulas for the tweets behaviour can be applied by a set of presets. These mathematically created presets can also be customised by adjusting the values on a graph:
Although they are invisible, SH3D does have timelines.. Not in the main window, but in the built-in video renderer as well as in EnkoNyito’s PVR plug-in, there are timelines. Look at it this way: When entering camera positions we are in fact entering keyframes on a timeline. Each enter tells the renderer not only the cameras position, it also holds info on the field of view, the body and head angles, the elevation of the camera, and I think at least the first keyframe also tells the time of day. And like in any other timeline, tweens are auto-created in the space between the keyframes. That’s how we get movement and changes in the camera settings.
Speed vs.Time
These tweens, invisible and non-adjustable for the user, are created based on one of two constants: Speed or Time.
And it’s here I have detected a difference in behaviour between the built-in renderer and Enko’s PVR plug-in, that seem to indicate that the built-in renderer creates motion based on speed, whereas Enko’s PVR plug-in creates motion based on time.
In EnkoNyitos PVR plug-in, at least up until now, the distance between positions takes the same amount of time, whatever the distance. If it takes one second to move the camera 100 meters, it will also take one second to move it 10 meters, 5 meters, 1 meter or 1 centimetre. In other words: The shorter the distance – the slower the motion. In the built-in renderer, everything moves at a constant speed. The varying distances between the keyframes seem to have no effect on the motion.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but based on this observation, anyone can create controlled camera motions in SH3D using Enko’s PVR, and the combination of the two video renderers makes any kind of motion possible.
Pointing at the different mechanics of the two video renderers, is the purpose of this rather extensive, and possibly boring, intro. But this explains what made it possible for me to have the tram slow down gradually to a more life-like natural stop.
The following illustrations will show several versions of the tram. That’s because I have not worked continually with the film, so the illustrations are made at various times and on different computers. Most of the following illustrations are older previews made at an early state. Since then I have made some alterations.
But the process is the same, regardless of which edition of the tram I use for preview.
When planning to make a video with moving objects, I find it best to create the scenes in a way that make the objects follow straight paths; upwards - downwards or left - right. Curved lines can be very challenging for moving objects, although perfect for other camera work.
Some objects that are suitable for movements: Exteriors: Traffic, cars, busses, trams and trains, bicycles, airplanes, birds, clouds. Interiors: Doors and windows, elevators, drawers, height adjustable chairs and desks, adjustable ceiling lamps, blinds, awnings … anything that can belong in a presentation video. For magicians: Performing levitation is a high!
For my film project, I started with a horizontal line of houses facing us from the far side of a set of rails, indicating that something on rails would pass. At this point I did some experiments with the lighting, and when I finally decided on daylight, I ended up with a neutral grey sky and one big light panel at a distance.
A few words about the sky texture and why I use it:
The neutral grey sky is a b/w image with a white top. It can be regarded as partly cloudy, not necessarily fully overcast. The reason for using a grey sky is that the PVR plug-in from EnkoNyito offers an IBL-option. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image-based_lighting He has named this option “Enable sky lighting”. Selecting ”Enable sky lighting” means that the sky image is used as a light source, and that results are best if rendered with night symbol, often enhanced with various light panels.
The reason for not using daytime sunlight, is that sunlight in SH3D, while being perfect for rendering interiors, is not very good for exteriors with its powerful light and sharp, black shadows.
Here is the sky image file that I use:
Right-click and select Open in new tab to see the whole image file. It can be copied or downloaded, and is totally free to use. And yes, the aspect ratio is correct and will produce a natural looking non-distorted sky at normal body angles, and the size should be good for renderings down to f.o.v 40 before showing any pixelation.
Then some quick words about the equirectangular projection.
The normal understanding of the aspect ratio of the equirectangular projection ratio is 360˚ x 180˚ = 2:1. The equirectangular projection, originally visualising a map of the planet and made some 1900 years ago, fits perfectly around a sphere, and can be used as it is in VR and 360˚ environments. But in a 3D environment like in SH3D, using a 2:1 sky texture is not recommended. The sky stops naturally at the horizon, so at a 2:1 ratio, the height will be compressed and create distortion also on the visual lower part of the sky. Distortion will of course always be present with a projection from a dome, but it doesn’t get noticeably visible until we point the camera hard upwards. The recommended aspect ratio for a sky texture in SH3D is therefore 4:1. That gives the least distortion.
The Demo-GreySKY weighs only 542 KB, so don’t downscale. If downscaled, the sky will look pixelated on lower F.O.V.s, and besides; the size does not affect the render time, (but the IBL-option might).
I have later added a faint sunlight for the final render, in order to justify the use of shadows:
After adjusting the 3D view to match the video format, (16:9), the point of view is stored. A starting point is the only P.O.V needed for the animation. This is my camera start position:
I have made three levels on the same elevation; LEVEL 1: the background, LEVEL 2: the foreground LEVEL 3: the tram (the middle-ground).
On our side of the rails, “ the foreground”, there is a platform and a tram-stop. The tram shall of course pass on top of the background and be partially hidden by objects in the foreground.
I make LEVEL1 the only level visible. Since nothing is beneath the background, it can be rendered like it is:
The next step is to hide everything but the foreground, by making Level 2 the only level visible. A luminous backdrop is placed under and behind the foreground, so that the ground is hidden Like this:
The backdrop will become invisible in the post-production, and will be discussed in detail later.
The next step is to get the tram in the picture. With all levels visible, I place it at the tram stop before isolating it, making sure it is placed exactly, with the wheels on the rails. Since the tram contains both green and blue colours, I have to make the backdrop another colour. or else some parts of it will become invisible or partly see-through. I landed on pink:
Speed and time:
“SPEED equals distance divided by time.” Then TIME must equal distance divided by speed. I measure the distances with the create dimensions tool, and find that the tram has a total travelling distance of about 141 meters. There are 80 meters from the starting point to the point where I want the tram to start slowing down, and then there are 61 meters from that spot to the tram stop. But the tram shall overshoot a bit, so in ”reality”, if I can use that word, I have maybe some five meters extra.
Let’s do the math: A city tram vil travel at about 45 km/h. The tram shall travel for about 80 meters before starting to slow down. That should be about six and a half second at 45 km/h. The distance from the deceleration point to the tram stop is 61,7 meters. That gives me some thirty meters to halve the speed, then fifteen meters to halve it again, and then seven meters to halve it a third time. That leaves me with approximately eight meters to create a nicely controlled retardation.
Creating the motion
So I start with having the tram at the tram stop, where it shall stop. This is the first position I enter in the video renderer.
In order to make the tram advance forward, I must first move the tram backwards to where it shall come from – a start position as far back I have rails. Using only the shift+left arrow keys, and not the mouse, I make sure the tram moves in a straight line and doesn’t de-rail en route to the start position on its first journey. This is as far back as possible.
And then I start moving the camera:
The illusion of a moving tram starts as the camera is moved closer and closer to towards it. I am using only the left arrow and the shift key. Too keep track of the distance, I use a sky texture with some visual landmarks plus the top ruler as guides, and to be on the safe side I also place a thumb on the screen, close to the spot. The camera moves towards the tram until it is under my thumb, so to speak, approximately at the spot where it shall start slowing down. Approximately is okay. After all it isn’t a moon landing, so I have a fair amount of leeway. But it takes too many clicks. I need the exact number of clicks as I have used in my formula. But I have the distance and I have a stop watch, and since the renderer is governed by time, I can easily adjust the speed until it takes six and a half second at twenty clicks.
Q: Adjust the speed? How do you do that? A: I will come to that shortly.
Originally I started doing this film in a late evening light, as a kind of film-noir pastiche with high contrasts and dark shadows. I even considered black and white for a while. I had planned to have a scene at this point, with the tram passing at the same time our man was walking by. I thought that was a great idea.
The late noir evening version:
But the “noir version” didn’t feel right, so I changed it to a daylight version:
In the end I cut out the entire scene. It was unnecessary and didn’t fit the story. And besides: Nobody would know who that man was anyway.
Later, when he leaves the café, I kept the evening light version ( with a little less “noir” contrasts) for the last part of the film, thinking that it was plausible our man had spent some hours at the Café Social, contemplating the abrupt disappearance of the Telda.
I have the tram at the point of deceleration. I have counted the clicks and made a note in my notebook. According to my calibrations, I should now use ten clicks to halve it, and then use eight, five, two and one to get the tram to the next position – the position where I will no longer use the shift+left arrow combination, only the left arrow alone. But I like to improvise, so instead I do twelve and then eight, and then four, two, and one. I check it in the video renderer, and the deceleration looks even better than what I had planned. The tram is now approx. five meters from the stop position, a bit closer than I meant. But then there’s the overshoot, so I’m okay with that.
A new entry in the renderer.
As mentioned, from this point on, I have no need for the shift key. I do a sequence of eight, five three, to and one click with only the left arrow.
The preview looks good. Another entry in the renderer, and one in my note-book. Documentation can be handy in case I should do something similar sometime…
How can I control the speed?, was the question. Time for the explanation.
Time vs.Speed
: One of the features in SH3D, is that the further in we zoom, the shorter the distance pr click. This feature is of course essential for placing objects at an exact position. I will use it for advancing the camera. As explained earlier, EnkoNyito is using time as a constant in his earlier versions. A short movement lasts just as long as a long one.
The answer to the question: Zooming out from the camera increases the distance of each click, meaning it takes fewer clicks to reach the 80 meters mark.
Zooming in on the camera reduces the speed, and it takes more clicks to reach the mark. I zoom out until twenty shift-clicks makes the tram cover the distance in 6,5 seconds. Then I keep this zoom level as default.
Just to avoid any misunderstanding: I do not zoom in WITH the camera. I don’t touch the camera at all! I zoom in ON the camera. That means holding down the cmd (ctrl) key and use the + or - key to zoom in or out.
And now it’s time to zoom in on the most complicated part.
(I put myself in a comfortable TRY&FAIL-mode with a shot of Italian espresso and a small glass of Grappa.)
Making my tram retard smoothly to a stop, is a process with a high try & fail factor. How the amount of zooming affects the click-distance is hard to predict, and of course I fail several times. But I write down every number of clicks I do, just so I don’t make the same errors over and over. The previews from the video renderer are kind of jittery and occasionally even lagging, so I can’t be really sure until I have rendered a Q1 preview.
Closer
And closer
On the last zoom-in I can no longer see the tram. Movements are tiny. But I count the clicks and write them down, so I know where I go wrong for the next try. The only way to get control of the zoom-factor is to store screenshots and compare.
Yes, I know! This is way too ambitious, and I normally don’t spend so much energy on creating motion effects, but I want to find out exactly how smooth I can get it.
And so: At some point I have to decide that it is okay after seeing a Q1 render of the total from start to stop. I have reached that point.
This is my final sequence, the one I ended up using: I zoomed in three times, closer and closer on the camera. First just a bit, and then entered eight, five and two clicks. Then zoomed in quite a bit more, and repeated the same click-sequence. After that, having zoomed in very close, I entered a full sequence from nine to one.
Then I made a Q4 rendering while making another coffee. That rendering called for another glass of Grappa, not because I was overjoyed, quite the opposite. The tram that had looked so great in Q1, looked like a wreck in Q4.
(There’s a story behind that tram. I might write something about that in the next section.)
But I could still work with it as a placeholder. So I just continued using the tram-wreck for the last steps, which was to make the tram leave.
In my manuscript it says that the tram shall leave in a hurry. That means I can zoom out and make bigger steps. A click sequence with only left arrow: one, two, four, eight, and then shift-click: two, four, eight and sixteen. That brings the wreck to oblivion.
In the film there is a bicycle and a car passing. They are both passing through the picture, from one side to the other, and disappear.That means they can hold a constant speed. I calculate the speed / distance/ time, like with the tram.
Then I am more or less ready for the next chapter: The post-production.
Netherlands
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Re: Creating motion graphics with Sweet Home 3D
Oh my, you spend an awfull lot of time creating this how-to for us. Excellent work and at a level that most users can replicate. I like the gif alternative to videos. Much easier to present on a web page. Thank you!
---------------------------------------- Dodecagon.nl 700+ 3D models, manuals, and projects
Russia
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Re: Creating motion graphics with Sweet Home 3D
Thanks! It takes many days to delve into this.. The movement of objects in architecture is difficult. Thank you for your hard work. Doing a beautiful job is not the same as explaining. I'll try to figure it out.. Your manual is impressive. So far, I see the main difficulty for myself - how to apply this valuable information. Yes, the kinematics of drawers and furniture parts seems promising. I use SH3D for high-quality visualization, not as a design tool. Because I don't understand how you can do everything at the same time on a complex level without compromising creativity and practice. I use other programs for designing. SH3D is great for presentations. But your new ideas for working with videos open up new possibilities, I don't really understand what these prospects are yet (Google try to translate everything correctly).
Norway
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Re: Creating motion graphics with Sweet Home 3D
Hello and thanks, GaudiGalopin3324. I know from feedback from students that I can sometimes be a bit hard to understand, when they ask me to explain again. So if there are things you don't quite understand, I still have two days to edit the post, and as long as I want to edit my illustrations, so please tell me if there are things I ought to be more clear about, and I will do my best.
I think all talents come from the same place. Creativity is like a flame burning inside, that gives energy and curiosity, and an urge to explore the unknown. So spreading your creativity on several areas is rather an enrichment than a drawback. My areas all belong on the same field, and interacts with each other. A composition is a composition. Whether it is music, sound design, graphic design, writing or photography. It's always about communicating something you have inside that wants to get out. The communication channel is always less important than the message. I am old enough to have spent my ten thousand hours practising each of my areas of communication, so I know from experience that your visualisation talent will hardly suffer or diminish, rather the opposite, if you should dive into other art forms and ways of expressing yourself. You might even be inspired and bring your visualisations to a new level!
Out of curiosity I just had Google translate my post to Norwegian. A total disaster. ChatGPT did a much better job. So maybe you should try ChatGPT or some other AI-service to translate?
Russia
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Re: Creating motion graphics with Sweet Home 3D
Hi! I keep thinking about how to make a balance between a difficult ending and a lack of tools. There are few tools in SH3D (or rather, there are none) to make complex animations. There is little capacity for complex experiments. Therefore, I see it right to focus on one direction, and replace it with an illusion on the second. I have already implemented in my visualizations the replacement of 3D models with images on boxes, this expands the possibilities for very high-quality visualization. I will try to make a visualization with furniture transformation. It will be difficult for me and the computer to work with frame-by-frame gifs and necessarily replace the rest of the movements with ready-made video templates. I see that this is the right way to work in SH3D. The emphasis is on one thing, the rest is an illusion and imitation, replacement. With careful and high-quality connection, there should be an impression of a lot of work. I studied 3ds Max, animation can take many days to load there. In SH3D, you need to deceive the viewer, otherwise the result is impossible. but I will try to make such a mix in a 3D scene. While my experiments did not touch the movement of objects, I was even afraid to think about it. Now we have to try, all the secrets have been revealed by you)). There is no way back.
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Re: Creating motion graphics with Sweet Home 3D
I made this cartoon. I tried it right away with light, but this scene has a minimum rendering quality of 1000x1000 and primitive light. In this form, each frame takes 40 minutes with reconfigurations. For a dishwasher, the cycle is 47 frames. This time should be multiplied by at least three. And then cleaning and installation. It took me 5 days. If you do it without light, then of course the process is faster, the frame is created instantly. But I'm only interested in rendering with lighting, and unfortunately this is a long process. Of course, that's how all cartoons are created - heavy monotonous manual labor.
