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Orbit animation (useless)


Kazemester

Question

Now with the new VW2020 version I try to make an orbit animation (which was so easy to do in the earlier versions---i don't know why you devs always have to change stuff that work), but whatever I try it just does not work. I try to make an Ortogonal projection fly around my pointcloud, but it always shows a "flat" orbit around with the cameras pointing straight.

If i untick that box than i can set the keyframes 1 by 1 by selecting the cameras and pitch them (which does NOT work in 3D of course....in 3D it only rotates on the xy plane....) on frontal views. And the result is...

Am i stupidly doing something wrong or it should work but it is bugged? (It is SP3 now...)

Thanks for the help.

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Apart from Shadow analysisI never use VW for animations either:

I find it easier to livesync to Lumion & produce a fully rendered animation there.

 

Perhaps a good improvement would be if, as @Kazemestersuggests, we use the 3dConnextion or VW naviagation tools to describe the flight path that Renderworks can then use to render the animation.

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1 hour ago, bcd said:

we use the 3dConnextion or VW naviagation tools to describe the flight path that Renderworks can then use to render the animation.

 

 

That would mean that VW is automatically creating enough Camera Position Keyframes in between.

If it does not work now as it is, with user given Keyframes ......

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7 hours ago, Kazemester said:

I bought a 3Dconnexion SpaceMouse Compact and i use it to move the camera smoothly around. Simply i just create a shaded render and i record the video with quicktime - screen recording. 😄

This is actually what I do as well. But it doesn't work for renderworks-quality animations, and doesn't create something you can then edit and refine.

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10 hours ago, line-weight said:

This is actually what I do as well. But it doesn't work for renderworks-quality animations, and doesn't create something you can then edit and refine.

Yeah...sadly it's just a "workaround"...it has its downsides. I wish new VW releases would take more than a year development like back in the "old days". 

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Or just continue the development of something through more than one release cycle, instead of abandoning it half finished.

 

It's very frustrating because it looks like there's probably not such a huge amount of extra work necessary to make the animation tool more useful. As per so many VW things, 90% complete = 0% usable.

 

It's not just a waste of time for users who put in a few hours trying to get it to work only to find that it doesn't - it's a waste of all the effort of whoever programmed it so far.

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7 hours ago, line-weight said:

 

Or just continue the development of something through more than one release cycle, instead of abandoning it half finished.

 

It's very frustrating because it looks like there's probably not such a huge amount of extra work necessary to make the animation tool more useful. As per so many VW things, 90% complete = 0% usable.

 

It's not just a waste of time for users who put in a few hours trying to get it to work only to find that it doesn't - it's a waste of all the effort of whoever programmed it so far.

 

This would be a relevant comment on a surprising number of threads on this forum. Just replace the word “animation”.

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So in response to @MaWi (post above):

 

Thanks for sharing these videos - was interesting to watch both of them.

 

Starting with the tutorial video, some observations:

 

- The orbit animation path is demonstrated - but only with the camera looking dead horizontal. See previous discussion in this thread for how things start to go wrong once you change that.

 

- Walkthrough path from saved views: this demonstrates the jerky transitions between segments that this tool creates. See from about 08:10 in the Vimeo video. There's no smoothing applied when the path changes direction. It doesn't in my opinion produce a professional looking animation. Ok, so maybe we can just accept that it's a simple tool but the video also demonstrates where it really messes up a transition, which is on the last leg of that path - it can't cope with the combination of change of camera angle and viewpoint height and we get a massive jump in viewpoint. This is acknowledged in the video but no demonstration of how to fix it is given.

 

- Walkthrough path from selection: we are shown an initial run at around 11:36 in the Vimeo video. Again the results aren't great, with much lurching around. There then follows several minutes of making adjustments - and these do make the lurching less bad - but they don't get rid of it. Around 15:00 the end point of the path is moved in the Z axis, to demonstrate that the path can rise upwards and look down at the model. The results of this are shown around 15:38 and they aren't good. Again, some adjustments are made - but we aren't shown the result. Knowing this tool myself, those adjustments may have improved it but I doubt they will have fixed it. Perhaps, after many many tedious adjustments something semi-acceptable would result.

 

So that was the tutorial video - it was then interesting to look at the finished video, where I would say @MaWi has produced a pretty good result, given the limitations of the tool. My observations - the paths used are reasonably unadventurous - in particular no big changes in camera view angle. The camera is always looking dead horizontal or very slightly up or down. I know why this is - it's because as soon as you deviate from that, things can start to go wrong. The jerky unsmoothed motion that the tool creates can nonetheless still be seen in this video - for example around 01:49 or between about 02:20 and 02:30.

 

My guess is that it took quite a lot of time and much adjustment to produce that animation, which still ends up with the unsatisfactory motion.

 

If anyone at Vectorworks was interested in improving the animation tool, then some of this stuff could be fixed.

 

As it is, in my view the animation tool is only any use if you follow very conservative paths and don't move the camera view angle too much. This of course isn't something you're told in documentation. So you are given the illusion that you can create these complex 3d paths with the camera view shifting around as much as you want ... but the fact is that most attempts to do anything complex end in disaster.

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Hi line-weight

 

8 hours ago, line-weight said:

- The orbit animation path is demonstrated - but only with the camera looking dead horizontal. See previous discussion in this thread for how things start to go wrong once you change that.

Thanks for hint. Yes, it is indeed difficult to control when the camera gets a different angle. I have just reported it to the development team.

 

8 hours ago, line-weight said:

Ok, so maybe we can just accept that it's a simple tool

I'm familiar with Cinema 4D's animation features, and I think they're deliberately and sensibly more feature-rich. But I'm still happy with this simple and fast feature of Vectoworks. And I think it's not realistic, that every user will learn another Tool just for a simple Animation of his next project. But clearly, if you make money with animations, you should acquire additional software.

 

8 hours ago, line-weight said:

The results of this are shown around 15:38 and they aren't good.

This was my very first attempt without having tried the animation tool before. I also have no technical background on what the "rules" are for calculating the transitions. I am satisfied with the ratio of the time spent and the result. Together with the students, I was able to gain a little more experience.

 

8 hours ago, line-weight said:

My guess is that it took quite a lot of time and much adjustment to produce that animation, which still ends up with the unsatisfactory motion.

No, I don't have time for that, I'm in the forum all the time 😉

While the students worked on their own animations, I was able to try out various things and also reported one or two errors to the development team.

 

Best regards, Marc

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12 minutes ago, MaWi said:

I'm familiar with Cinema 4D's animation features, and I think they're deliberately and sensibly more feature-rich. But I'm still happy with this simple and fast feature of Vectoworks. And I think it's not realistic, that every user will learn another Tool just for a simple Animation of his next project. But clearly, if you make money with animations, you should acquire additional software.

 

Of course if you want to make complex animations it would be unreasonable to expect to do everything you want within Vectorworks.

 

But I think that if we are presented with a tool that supposedly can let us do walk-throughs or fly-arounds, then it's reasonable to expect that without too much difficulty we can create something that we are not embarrassed to show a client. In my opinion the tool in its current state does not provide this.

 

It will provide something just-about-OK if we want to make a cautious movement past a building without too much change in level or view angle. Your video shows this - but your tutorial video also shows where the limits are reached.

 

I also know where the limits are reached after spending quite a bit of time trying to get the tool to do what I want.

 

I could list a number of issues I've discovered with it.

 

In the end, I don't use it to create walk-throughs for my clients, because I don't want them to get seasick. Instead I resort to a direct screen recording of me moving around the model manually. It's a bit wobbly but better than what I can get from the animation tool and takes a fraction of the time.

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I personally don't see the value of VW spending energy developing something like orbit animations.   I'd rather see them continue developing their relationships with partner companies like Twinmotion that do a much better job.

I can produce a far better presentation in very little time sending my model to TM.   Now with a lot of our client meetings being held on a zoom call I'll just share my screen with VW open and move around the model using saved views,  orbit and clip cube. 

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I would find it useful if there were some improvements in the animation functions that would make the tool more valuable. Let's see what the future brings. 
I'm also looking forward to Enscape coming out for macOS...the connection to Twinmotion works very well for me already.

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