Using animation for architectural visualization

Architectural visualization has included animation for more than 15 years now. The level of quality and sophistication has improved tremendously. All the improvements mentioned in rendering such as lighting, textures, and entourage are important for animation as well. Animation has undergone specific advancements in camera matching, projected backgrounds, compositing, sound, and render farms.

Camera matching to film has developed significantly. Programs such as Boujou allows an existing site to be filmed from a moving car or helicopter and to capture the camera path for animating and composition an animation of a future building with in that video.

Camera projected backgrounds to help model and texture scenes more realistically when camera matching is not possible or desirable. This process involves photographing a scene and then projecting that photo on to a background or objects.

Compositing for animation is to take multiple layers of video, text, lines, animations, and transitions and combine them into a singular video that is more visually compelling. There are a number of great software packages for compositing. There are both 2d and 3d compositing packages.

2D compositors are very linear. They allow for tradition film editing of multiple layers of information. The compositors have both video and sound tracks. Programs such as Adobe Premiere and Apple Shake are common place among visualization artists.

3D compositors are more dynamic but also more complicated and difficult to operate. 3D compositors allow for manipulation of a prerendered scene, textures, and lighting in a 3D space. It allows for rendering individual attributes or objects in a scene, without having to rerender the entire scene. It also allows for more interaction of lights and objects.

Sound is very important to video. People are accustom to watching television and movies on a daily basis. When there is video without sound, something innately seems wrong. Compositing music, narrative, and sound effects is more than a luxury, it is often necessary to a successful presentation.

Using sound and music generators can be very successful way of quickly adding the necessary ambient noise to add realism to a scene. Programs like Sound Forge are instrumental in video editing. The generators are also royalty free.