Architectural Animation Planning with 3ds, Max, and Vray(phase 1)

1. 1- INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the architectural animation course using three DS Max and V. Ray. My name is Mohammed Alloush Room. I'm an architect, Auto, this certified professional and authorized instructor. I've been working with three DS max for over 10 years now, with the previous work experience off more than 80 architectural projects, including interiors, exteriors and animations. In the scores, I will teach you a step by step process to make your three D architectural design come to life with animation. The goal off this course is to give you the skill set needed to move from making still shots making great animations. This course is based on a project that I've just finished. For three villas in a place near London called Combi Green. I broke down the process into simple steps that you can apply toe any architectural project . To make it even easier, these steps were simply fired into three courses. Each course focuses on a specific phase off creating animation videos. There are tons of tips, Jakes and techniques scores that will save you a massive amount of time and make your final product perfect. Check out the final product next video 2. 2 THE FINAL PRODUCT: - read . I see them blue and I think to myself What I wonder, Right? Blessed day dogs and I think to myself what I wonder the colors of the rainbow booth way, way much. And I think to myself when I 3. 3 COURSE OVERVIEW: when doing Arc animation videos, you or your team would have to go through three phases to get the work done. Those faces are planning execution and production. In this course. We will focus entirely on Phase one planning. We will learn the right ways to plan your project together with your client and how to calculate your pricing and time needed to finish the job. Next, we will learn how to make a storyboard. It's a way off planning out movies on paper and making sure that this is exactly what the client needed. From there, we will continue planning our camera passes in the sea where, exactly we want our cameras and what are the most important features we want to show off. For that we will get a bit technical in Max on. We will learn some basic fundamentals of animation. Then we will move to cinematics. We will learn some famous camera movements that the professionals tend to do, as well as the techniques to do them. In Max Leslie, we will learn how to give our client a sneak peek of our movie before render for their approvals or adjustment. So that's it for this course after completing Phase one, you will have everything planned out for your work and will also have the client's approval . So the ball will be in your court then and you'll be ready for my other two courses. Face two and phase three face two will be. How are we gonna work smartly toe? Finish our plan tasks. We will talk about our hardware, what to buy and what is the best toe upgrade to give us the best performance. We will also talk about working smart to make things light and decrease the render time. We will learn solutions for common problems that will face you like large amount of trees and landscape elements. How to animate water features like fountains and waterfalls, how to move people and cars and more face three will be about rendering and post production . We will learn about ways we can decrease our rendering time by separating Clyde calculations from the finer render as well as controlling our frame. Render time, however we want, we will learn how to set up network rendering and make multiple computers do the job automatically. We will also learn the trick off separating the renders off moving objects like cars and peoples and then compositing them in after effects. We will also learn a step by step postproduction in after effects till we produce our final movie. There is much to learn in the upcoming courses, so get ready and let's get started. 4. 4 lecture 4 communication with client 2016: communication was client. A good plan starts with a clear communication with your client. Whether your client is a company or an individual, you want to make it clear that you will need a contact person to be assigned from their part with whom he will be responsible for decision making and approvals down the road. It's important to keep in touch with the contact person during your work stages. Deals must be clearly written in meetings or in emails that you can come back to later. Trust me, that way off organizing stuff will save you a lot of hassles. A client might take a decision today and forget about it a week later. Same thing can happen to you. At this point. You can come back to the deal's written or emailed. Your contact person will be responsible for checking your progress, providing you with any missing data, giving approvals after each face receiving the final product and making sure you get paid on time topics you need to discuss with your client. Topic number one. The purpose off the animation Is it for marketing on the Internet, or is it for real state exhibition? Or maybe for TV commercial topic number two The scope of work. What exactly your final project should look like? Is it exteriors on the or you gonna add some interiors and night shot as well? Do they want to add some special video footages or just animation? How many minutes needed? Everything should be clear on that one. Topic number three phases of your work making animation Movie doesn't get finished overnight. You have to be clear with your client that there are certain steps you will both go through in orderto have their perfect movie, they aspire. Topic number four timing based on the faces above your speed of work, your equipments and other team members. If you have any, you will decide the time needed for each phase and add them together, and you can estimate the time needed to finish the job. Topic. Number five Pricing pricing can be set in rates per minute or seconds, for example, for every minute in animation, your price rate might be $2000 maybe they need five minutes movie, so your pricing will be 2000 times five. That's $10,000 as a bonus. Was this lecture I've included my personal word Document off the quotation. This paper will keep both you and your client clear and organized. Let's take a look at the quotation. When you meet your client, you print out this paper, take it with you and fill it up with the client. The purpose off this paper is to keep you focussed and organized and to make everything clear between you and your client. So this is the quotation on the upper left side. We have some basic information. They project name and customer name. Next is the contact person information name, mobile number and email. Down here is the purpose off the project. Ask your client and fill in the information here on the right hand side. Here we have the scope off work. You will ask if the project will need modelling or is it already modelled? Will it need lighting and picturing? Will it need camera animation? Will it need compositing mixing footages with the animation? Are we going toe? Add life videos to our animation and if so, who is going to provide such footage is Sometimes you will need to buy some stock video footages from the Internet and add it with the animation, video editing and postproduction. That's a phase you will need to color. Correct your videos and add music and put everything together. Voice over is where you hire a professional to read a script that goes along with your movie. You will mark what's needed on what's not needed here, because that will be calculated later on in your timing and pricing. Next, we will go down toe the work faces stable. It's a table with three columns. One is for the work phase one is for the assigned job and the other is for the time needed to finish their job. In working days, you will estimate the time needed for every as high in job. Add them together, and you can calculate an estimated time to finish the whole movie. Next is the final movie duration. For example, five minutes and your price rate permitted, for example, $3000. So we want five minutes on each minute costs 3000. Then the total fees will be 15 south of dollars. Finally, an important line down here To be sure of the seriousness of your client, 50% down payment should be given to you upon court approval. Another 25% will be given to you at the preview approval just before rendering. And finally, the 25% you will get upon delivery. Now we have made our deal clear. It's time to start working. 5. 5 LECTURE 5 DESIGNING THE STORYBOARD 2016: designing the storyboard. A storyboard is like a sketch plan for your video, and your video is a message that you need to send to the minds off the viewer in a clear and pleasant way. So just before designing our storyboard, we will take a moment to think about that message. Based on the communication with my client, I came up with important messages that my video will be conveying. Those important messages are the location. Those villas are in a prime location next to London and Wimbledon. So I'm thinking, Let's have more focus on the Google Earth location and maybe some video footage is off. London Next, the design. It's a classic like Jerry's design, with beautiful landscape waterfalls and swimming pool. I'm thinking that mood will be perfect with some slow classic music, maybe something with an English accent to it. Next marketing message for the buyer. The villas are worth more than six million English pounds each from thinking I gotta show them the life inside these villas, people swimming, eating and having fun. Now comes the time for the storyboard paper as a bonus with this lecture have included my personal word document off the storyboard paper in the downloads section. Now we will design our movie. Here we have three columns. One is for the action. One is for the duration on. One is for what we are seeing on the screen for the action. We will start our movie with the entro, usually the company's logo, the project logo and name with some light video editing with after effects. This might take around 15 seconds. Duration on. We might put our logos here. Next will be the location off the villas. We might use Google Earth together with aftereffects to show off the location we can use. Some live video footage is that you can get from YouTube using YouTube downloader, or you can buy this footage is for more professional stock. Footage is websites. Next will be the transitioning from the Google Earth toe three DS max animation. I wanted to make some smooth transition that might take 30 seconds, going from the sky in the Google Earth toe, where I have some clear view off the villas in Max. Next, I'm thinking they're these villa information. We might pose and display their size on specifications. Then we have the camera movements for the three villas. These are the ones that we are going to be a rendering. We will talk about them in the next video and the out true and cast that might take 15 seconds as well. Now, let's calculate we have here 15 plus 45. That's one minute and we have another minute here. That's two minutes out of five, so we have three minute left. We might divide them one for each villa, and never mind about the Outro. We might give them these 15 seconds for free. Now you have the storyboard planned out. You get back to the contact person for approvals on the storyboard. Just made. Ask for any addition of death I needed. Like locals in high resolution, you might have some choices for the music you are going to use. You might ask for approvals on that, too. Once you have the approval, is time to sketch our camera passes for the movements here. Also, if you're working with a team, you can start dividing tasks for the team members. Other team members might get busy with the logo intro, the Google Maps and the video footages download for us. We will learn how to sketch our camera passes in the next video 6. 6 lecture 6 sketching camera paths 2016 with camtasia effects: sketching camera pauses. Now we have our storyboard figured out, and now we calculated the needed amount off animation. Inside Max. We have one minute off animation for each villa, and we have the transition from Google Earth to Max. That's another 30 seconds. Let's break down how it's done. Here is the Formula One. Figure out the key features we want to show to divide them into small clips. Three. Deter mined the time needed for each clip. For example, We have the layout for our villas here. Let's start by the first villa. Key features. We have nice entrance elevation and drop off area. Here we have back elevation year. Andi pool Here, divide them. It's better to break down the animation into small clips than one big clip going from one feature toe Another. So in our case, we will need one camera here showing the front one camera. They're showing the bank on one here showing the pool and the waterfalls. Depending on your own project, you will decide the key features and the cameras needed time. The cameras. We have 60 seconds for this villa. We need three cameras. We might divide them equally. 20 seconds for each or not. Equally, depending on your project, you might also start throwing some ideas. Like in camera one, a BMW entering the gate camera off the pool. I want someone swimming here on someone eating there. Now that we have the formula to sketch our camera passes, apply that your project on. Then we can translate that in Max. 7. 7 LECTURE 7 BASICS OF ANIMATION IN 3DS MAX2: basics off animation in three DS Max, a movie consist off multiple photos appears in front of your eyes so quickly so you can feel the movement in Max. That 40 rendered is called a frame. For one second of animation, you'll need to render at least 15 frames so you can feel the movement for higher quality animation. The frames per second rate that's called F B s. You would use 30 frames per second. Let's open up max at the bottom. Here we have the timeline that consists off 100 friends, and we have here this tiny bottom called time configuration. If we press it, we will have the time configuration window opens up. We can change the frame rate from here. We have here some international standard configurations like NTSC and PAL. NTSC is 30 frames per second and tell is 25. We can also use custom frames per seconds from here. For our movie, we will use Auntie ESI on the right. Here we have the time display. We can display our timeline in frames or in minutes and seconds. I prefer to displayed in frames in the middle. We have some playback options for when we press play, we wanna played in real time or slower or faster down there. We have the animation options. We have the start time and the end time. We can change the lands of the timeline from here. For example, if you want to change the default 100 frames toe 20 seconds timeline. We will need to make it 20 seconds times 30 frames per second. Eso the end time should be 600. Here is a quick tip. You can change the lands off the timeline if you press and hold control plus out, plus right, click with your mouse and move it to increase the desired number off frames. Now let's learn how to animate. We will start simple by making a box. We want to animate this box, moving from here to there in one second. To do that, we need to press photo key. When it's pressed, you will see a red frame surrounding your view port that mean it is recording. We want to any mate one second, so we will go toe frame 30 and move the box toe where we want it. By moving the slider, we can see that Max automatically created animation for us. If we wanted to play in real time, we will goto frame zero Andi Press play Notice the red mark at Frame 30 here that is called at Key Frame. A key frame holds a recording off the object state at that point off time. So at Frame zero, the key frame records the position of the box here and at Train 30. The key frame records the position off the box there and in between, Max creates the animation automatically on. That's simply the concept of animation in three DS max. We can apply this concept to other transforms like rotation and scale. Let's apply rotation animation on a new box, Select the box, go toe a desired frame and rotate. Max creates animation for that rotation. Let's apply scale animation on a new box For, like the box Goto, a desire to frame and scale Max automatically creates the animation. All spinners in Max can be animated as well with the same concept. For example, in a box we have spinner for its parameters like lens, wits and height. If we go to a desired frame and change the lens, you will notice. Red brackets appears at the spinners here, and since the Otaki is on, the animation will be created. We can also go to another point off time and animate the wits as well. If we move this lighter, we can see animation off both with and height. Most modifiers have spinners in them that can be animated. For example, we can animate, bend angle like this. We can also any made a gizmo inside a modifier like the slice plane inside the slice modifier. If we choose the option to remove top, then we go to a desired frame with the Otaki on and move the slice plane up like that, you can see Max has made a slice animation off that object. Materials and lighting can be animated as well. It's all in these three steps opened the Otaki moving time. Change the spinner, for example. If we want to any main intensity off the spotlight here, we will press. Oh, Toki, Make sure it's recording Goto a desire to frame and change this Pinar. Same for materials. Three steps. One Opened the auto key to move in time. Three. Change the spinner and maybe that spinner is inside the material itself. By pressing M and open the material editor, we can animate the material that is applied to that box in the diffuse slot I applied noise map. Inside that noise map, there is a spinner that is called Phase. It changes the noise pattern like a moving waves in a water. So if we change the spinner and animated it, we can see animation off material applied another week. Tip. Here. The color off the key frame for move is red. The color off the key frame off rotation is green, and the color off the key frame off skill is blue. The color off key frame off any other spinners is black. What if we want to change the speed off the animation like the rotation here, I want to make it rotate slower. Simply, I will select the box, go toe the key frame and give it more time. Instead of its retaining three rotation in one second, I will give it more time and make it complete the animation in frame 60 instead of 30. Now the animation is slower. Same applies. If I wanted quicker, I will give it less time and move the key frame to frame 15 instead. Now the animation is faster. We can also add multiple key frames, changing the state of the object from one state to the other to the other. We can also copy key frames by pressing, shift and drag with the left mouse bottom. We can use that space down here, toe accurately. Move this lighter toe a specific frame by typing its number here, for example, type 75 enter. We can also extract a key frame from an existing animation. For example, if we have this box here moving from frame 0 200 let's extract frame 60. We go here on type 60 and press enter. We are ready to extract the key frame. Here we have this bottom with key icons on it called set key. When we press it, it extracts the state of the object toe, a key frame here. It doesn't change the animation in one way or another, but now we have the option off moving this key frame on my timeline that will goes a variation off speed. For example, if we move frame 60 to frame 20 the animation will move fast and then it slows down. If we move it the other way, let's say we moved it to frame 90. The animation will start slower and then it speeds up at the end. That's it for the basics. It's very important to understand these concepts because we will use that a lot in the upcoming lectures. 8. 8 lecture 8 FINE TUNING ANIMATION 2016: in previous lesson, we learned the basics of animation in three DS Max. In this lesson, we will learn how to find Tune Our animation here is an example. Let's say we have a ball and we want that ball to bounce on that ground. Let's use the basic key frame technique. We still like the ball Goto frame 50 Open. They're all Toki. We can use the front view port, move it till it touches the ground, then Goto Frame 100 and moving back up as if it has bounced. If we press play, we will get something like this. It doesn't look like bouncing, does it? Well, To solve this issue, we will have to use the curve editor. Let's open the curve. Editor Goto graph editor and press track view Curve editor The Curve Editor Window opens, and as the ball is still selected, we can see a graph presentation off its animation. Our animation values is presented in a curve through time. So in this graph, up and down is a change of value. Left right is a change off time in frames and since we are on Lee animating position off the ball, moving up and down. We will see on the Left exposition why position and Z position are highlighted. If we clicked on one of them, we can isolate and it it it's curve. As you can see, exposition Curve is flat. Why Position curve is flat because our bowl is only moving and Z position. And if we moved our timeline bar, we will notice that the key frame with the smallest value is where the bowl touches the ground, and the key frame with the largest value is the K frame where the bowl is in the air and in between is the curve off movement. To make the bouncing effect, we will need to edit this curve. The problem with this curve if that it is so smooth down here at frame 50. In real life, when a ball bounces, it hits the ground and jumps back up so quickly. We have a set of tools here called key tangents that does the trick. Keat engines lets you control the curves between Keith bring, select the desired key frame, and if you're hovered over the tools here, you will see a mini text. The describes that engine precept press said attention too fast and press plane and thats much better bouncing effect. We will continue to find Tune it. But first, let's get familiar with the curve editor interface in the next video. 9. 9- CURVE EDITOR INTERFACE: Curve editor interface. Let's take a closer look on our curve. Editor in the middle top. We have some tools called navigation controls. Their job is to give you a better view of your curves. For example, we have pan and we have zoom extent, horizontal and zoom extent vertical. We have zoom and Zoom region. We also have a bottom toe. Isolate a curve. We can also use our mouths wheel while using pan to zoom in and out. If you press control on the keyboard while zooming in and out with the mouse wheel, it will zoom in and out horizontally on the upper left hand side. We have key frame control tools like moving key frames or drawing your own graph manually. Notice that any change you do in the curve editor will reflect down here on the timeline. First, we have a move tool for the key friends. It moves the key frame anywhere in the graph, but if we press control, it will only change the value. If we release control, the key frame can be moved in every direction. Notice. When you move a key frame in curve editor, it moves in the timeline as well. But still, there is another one at frame 50. That happens because we only moved the key frame on the Z position curve and we still have key frames remaining on exposition. And why position? So if we delivered the key frames on the X and Y positions, we noticed that the key frame at 50 no longer exists. We also have the option to type in the values here, moving the key frame in the curve. Editor effects both position and timing off our bouncing ball. It's not bouncing at frame 50 anymore, and it's not touching the ground. You will be back to frame 50 select the key frame and type 50 next toe frame and press enter to make it touch the ground again. At that frame. I don't know what value to put, so I will open auto key and move it in the position until it touches the ground. There is also a tool that lets you add key frames on curves. For now, that's all they need to know about key controls. Let's move on to keep the ancients. We tried Tet engine too fast. In previous video, let's examine the others the 1st 2 buttons lets you control the curves manually. The next five are just common presets. That doesn't give you a manual control. If you want to manipulate the preset, press the preset on, then press said. Attention toe spine. The difference between set engine to spline and set engine toe auto is that photo will, said the tension back to its original settings. So if you want to manipulate a preset, better set engine to supply, the last two buttons are braked ancient and unified. Change int Unified Attendant looks the angle between the two tensions. Why Braked engine lets you control each tangent separately from the other. Now that we learned the interface and the tools off the curve editor, let's bring it to action in the next video. 10. 10 FINE TUNING THE NEXT LEVEL: fine tuning the next level. In the previous lesson, we made our ball bounce one time in this lesson, we will let it bounce multiple times until it comes to a full stop. To do that, we will repeat this curve here with decreasing value in every bounds. For other bounces, the ball will touch the ground at the Z value, same as frame 50. If we select friend 50 than this value here is the ground level. If we copy this value, then goto frame, 100 paste. We can see the ball bounce once and then rests on the ground to make another bounds. In between, we can add a key frame using the key tool and place it on the curve. In this case, we want the ball at that key frame to touch the ground. So we have a bounce up and then touches the ground, bounce back up again and rest on the ground to make this key frame touches the ground. We will place the value off frame 50 and press enter. Now, when this key frame is at the ground, there is no bouncing between this key frame and the last one because the curve between them is a straight line. To fix that, we will have to create Ah hump here, select the key frame and set engine to split. If we moved the attendants, we find out that they are unified. We will have to press braked engines and move each handle independently, creating the hump here a little less than the bounds. Before, if we move the slider, we can see a small bounds. And then at smaller bounce, we can then increase our timeline with control plus art, plus right click on our mouse and continue our bouncing. On a larger timeline. We can repeat the same steps to add another bounds. So as you can see, every time the ball bounces, its power fades and also the curve becomes less. If we press play, we can see the bouncing until it gets to a full stop. It's working fine, but as you can see, the first harm falls way higher than the other three homes. This effect might happen in heavy metal bowl and not a basketball or tennis ball. Let's give it a try to change that effect. We have a hump that is too high for the others. Let's bring it down. Press control and move. Maybe it it It's handles as well. Just a tip here. If we use the set engine too fast, preset on this harms the curve returns flat to let set engine the fast preset work correctly. There has to be another key frames here in the middle with higher values than the ones down here. Let's add key frames and move them up. Let's now select the ground key frames and press set engine so fast. Now it worked correctly said attention to Fast needs to be between ground frames and airframes. It doesn't work between two ground frames. Let's press play. It is bouncing nicely, but it takes too long falling to fix that. Select the key frames in the curve Editor or the timeline. They are the same and move them closer to the first key frame, making this area smaller. We can also decrease the value off the first frame. Let's press play. It's now bouncing realistically. But what if we wanted to bounce more aggressively? Well, there is a tool for that called region key tool. This tool lets you select a region off key frames and scale it either vertically or horizontally. If we press and hold that box here and pulls up, you can see it's kills the values off all frames. If we press play, we find the ball jumps higher. Let's scale it. Even Mawr notice it skills all values. But the problem is that it scales from zero. So the friends that touches the ground with values 30 something. After scaling, they become 80 something. They leave the ground. So now we made it bounce more. But now it's not on the ground. Well, let's increase the balancing even more. And let's fix the not on the ground issue simply. We will goto a frame where we want the ball to touch the ground. And while the auto key is closed, we will move the ball. So when you move an animated object while the auto key is closed, the whole animation moves along with it. Now we have our bouncing bowl back on the ground. Another useful use for the region key tool is to increase or decrease the time for selected animation. Let's select our animation using region key tool and click on one off these boxes on drag to decrease the time and make the animation faster. Or if we drag the other way around and increased the time we can make the animation go slower. So that set for the curve editor. I am sure it will come handy in fine tuning your animations. 11. 11 Camera movement techniques WHAT NOT TO DO : camera movement techniques. What not to do the way camera moves in your project will have a major impact on your movie . I will teach you exactly how to do it like a pro. But before I do, I really have to teach you what not to do. We have here what we can call a bad example off camera movement. What the animator was trying to do is to make a movie off one minute, showing everything in one big camera movement. Well, that is just wrong. Why is it wrong? One. It will make your camera movement much difficult toe handle. As you can see, the camera had to pass into trees, and the movement is just annoying. I'm sure that the animator who did this try to fix that. But as you can see, that's the best he could. Yet two. If you do that, you will have to add details in everything on your past, resulting in a very big, detailed scene and more render time. Three. The viewer would lose focus and get distracted by that movement. They don't know what exactly are you showing? So since we are professionals now, that's not what we are going to do. What we are going to do is one we will get our camera passes sketches to. We will work our way through them with professional cinematics techniques for camera movements used by riel movie creators. In this section, we will learn the techniques like the pan that Dolly, the Vertigo and other amazing techniques that really affects the quality of your movies, making the final product perfect. So get ready to learn how to do these cinematics in max and let's get started. 12. 12- CMT THE DOLLY: parallel camera movement that Dolly the Dolly is the easiest yet one of the most beautiful camera movement techniques in real life, Dolly is a camera that moves on a rail like this in Max. We will animate our camera and target parallel toe, a desired feature in our seen focusing on the details and beauty off that specific feature . In our design, we can enemy Dolly in three ways up down movement, usually showing the beauty off the elevations or side views of our buildings. Top Dolly shows the beauty off, the layout design and the landscape Left right. Dolly can show both the beauty off, the building and the landscape as well. Let's open our project and let's see, how can we use our dolly in a project like that? Well, I will try the first type, the up down movement here to show the beauty off the elevation. Let's start by creating a beer, a physical camera right here, and try to position it as parable as we can tow that elevation. So now we have a camera that is part of all to the elevation off the villa. Now the camera has been created on a zero level in Z position. So if we press see while it is still selected, we will view what the camera is shooting now the camera at zero level, it is basically shooting under the building. We will use our middle mouse bottom to pan and move it upwards. And that will be our first frame off our camera movement for a symmetric elevation like this villa, we will try to center our first shot like that. Now it's time to animate our camera from down to up. First, select the camera and go top and zoom extent. Then choose cameras in the selection filter here. Now select both the camera on the target and press the pink lamp here toe. Isolate now group them and give that group a name by grouping both the camera and the target. Together, it will be much easier to any made the Z position off that group, thus animating both the camera and the target. Similar Taney IHS Lee back to our scene and go to our camera view port. Let's say I want to animate a 10 seconds small movie. We will start by opening the auto key and go toe frame 300 press enter while the group off the camera and Target is still selected. We will move it upwards, using the spinners on the Z position till the top off the building, and that will be our end frame Now closed the old Oakey. If we moved the animation bar, we can see the animation has been created. Okay, now we have a problem. We can't play our animation in real time because we have a heavy scene and the graphic card can't handle playing it in real time. That's a common problem that faces animators off big scenes, and it will probably face you, too. We now can't be sure whether our camera movement is too fast or too slow. Luckily, there is a feature that solves the problem in three DS max called Grab Vieux Port grab Vieux Port will create a really time movie off your camera with the View fourth quality and produce a video file that can be played in your media player. To grab the few Port Goto tools preview, grab Vieux Port and press create preview animation. The make preview window opens. We can choose to preview a custom range off frames from here, in our case, from frame zero to frame 300 our 10 seconds animation down here is the percentage off the output based on the resolution that is set in the render settle. The number 100 here means 100% off the resolution off 12 80 times 7 20 If we decrease the percentage to 50% the Previa movie resolution will be half off that resolution that is already set so the movie will be created with 6 40 by 3 60 resolution. That said, the resolution and press create. When you press, create Max, start creating the preview video. We will see a progress bar under the timeline, and we will see the progress off the video in the middle. Off the screen. The speed off creation off that movie will be deter mined based on your graphic card and the poll account off your seed. If you find this process to slow hit escape, Max will ask you to play the part that it's finished in the default media player. To make it render faster previews, we can hide the unnecessary elements in our scene. It helps a lot when everything is organized on layers, we can hide the unnecessary layers from here. Let's make our preview animation again. Notice. This time it renters much faster on my machine. It renders a frame everyone second. So the preview animation is finished after five minutes on my machine. But for this lecture, I had to speed it up. Now I can see my camera movement in real time. Max created a video file and opened it on my default media player. It's a good idea to find that video file and keep it, because later we will use that file for our clients approval. The Previa file is automatically saved inside our project folder in a folder called Preview . Inside That folder, you will find a video file named Underscore Scene, and that is the video file that Max had just created. This is a temporary file. That means if we made another preview animation from Max, it will override this one unless we rename it so by giving it a new name. Maxwell not overwrite it in the next time it grades a preview animation. So that's it for the down up parallel camera movement. By using the same techniques, we can also create the top dolly and the side dolly as well 13. 13 LECTURE 13 CMT THE CRANE: camera movement techniques that crane the crane is one off the advanced camera movement techniques used by filmmakers in real life. They attached the camera on a device like this. It can be a small device like this one or a huge one. Like that. One crane movement is usually used to enhance the epic nature off large sets. Another use is to move up and away from the desired target, showing the context off the neighborhood off our building Crane movement is a common way off ending a movie. Let's learn how toe enemy crane like camera movement in three DS max. Let's open our project now. We want to animate our camera, starting from the corner here to the other side there. Let's start by creating a physical camera at the corner and the target at the building. Now presi view the camera. It's created at zero level. Move it up by using the band with the middle mouse button Press shift plus F to show the safe frame and adjust your first frame shop. Use camera tools toe. Adjust for interesting shot from the corner. When satisfied, use the to view port layout. Make one for the camera and the other one for the top view Presti for Top and Z for zoom extent and then press shift plus F to disable the say frames. Now we have a camera at the corner on the target at the middle of the building to any me the crane. We will select our camera, and we can set our selection Filter toe cameras so we don't accidentally select other seen objects. We can also select the camera and rename it from here. We will call it that crane. Now Select the cream camera, open the auto key Goto frame 300 move our camera. And since we have the two of you port layout set, any movement to the camera will be updated in the camera view port here. Now let's move our camera toe the other corner like this. Next, we will move it up by increasing the value of Z position. Using this spinners, let's take a look. Our camera is flying above the building. Now go to the View port and continue adjusting the last frame. Using the camera tools in this frame, we need to go back and show the context closed. The Otaki and examine the movement using the animation slider. Now the animation is OK, but I want to find Tune it to make it look perfect. The problem is, it gets too near to the building at these frames, and I wanted to move back to investigate this problem. Let's go to the top and zoom in to the camera. That's where the camera come close to the building. To fix this problem, we will use motion tragic trees, goto motion and press tragic trees. Now we can see the path off our camera shown in a dotted red line. Let's isolate to see it more clearly now, Max is showing us where the camera is moving. Now the camera is moving between two points. The first and the last key frames toe have a better control. We will have to add another key frame at the middle. Let's go to frame 1 50 add a key frame. This key frame will add a point on the trajectories here by pressing the button sub object , I can now control the position off the key frames that's at a key frame at frame 1 50 by pressing set key button now we can move that key frame and we can see the effect on the whole trajectory line. Now let's a nice a late and watch the effect on our camera movement. Let me undo the movement off the middle frame using Control Z and let's control the movement live now, giving it some curve to the outside. I worked on that camera a bit more by opening the auto key and adjusting the end frame, moving the camera itself until I feel the shot is perfect. But then I met a problem. My camera move inside, one off the trees. That's not something nice to be in my animation. I had to find a solution to that. After trying out several ways to think that I found out. The best thing is to move the three just a little bit, giving my camera a freeway to move. Now my camera movement is good to go. Just one more thing. Before we create our preview animation, we have toe unhygienic other elements that will appear when we go far in the last frame. And since I have organized everything on layers, my job will be easy now, just unhygienic the layers that would appear in this camera. Now the camera is ready for preview. An image tools grab Vieux Port. Create preview animation. This time I will increase the quality toe 100% breast. Create on. Also increase the compression quality 200%. I'm press OK on my machine. It took about seven minutes to create the preview video. Then it automatically plays it in my default media player, just like we did in the other cameras. We have to goto the preview folder inside our Project folder and rename the temporary files Underscore. Seen Teoh Camera Cree. So that's it for the crane camera animation. A beautiful camera movement technique for you to use in your upcoming projects. 14. LECTURE 14 THE TURNTABLEfinal: camera movement techniques. The turn table turntable is a technique used for showcasing a product by shooting it from all 360 degree angles. In real life. The position the product on the rotation off table like this, with a steady camera shooting the object while it's being rotated, it can be as simple as this one or more advanced version like that. One turntable movement could be used to present a 360 degree animation off our building in one side of the video while showing their information on the other side. Off the video, Let's learn how to animate a 360 degree turn table animation in three DS max that's open our project on Let's Do the turntable on these Vella to speed up our workflow. Let's hide some off unnecessary layers in our project. We will start by creating a circle from the center off our desired building with a big radius that sounds that building. Next, we will create a very physical camera with a target at the middle off the villa. Let's go to the left Vieux port and press see to see our camera view back to the view while the camera is still selected, we will go animation constraints, past constraints. And then we select the circle as our path for the camera. Max automatically created an animation for our camera following the path off the circle in the 700 frames off our timeline. If we only want 300 frames for this camera, simply we can move that key frame at 700 to frame 300. Now the camera, we rotate a 360 degree around our building in 300 friends. Let's select the camera on the circle and isolate for better view. Now, this camera is now attaching toe that circle. If we move that circle up, our camera will follow along. By checking this view port here, I realize that my camera target needs to be moved up as well. Right. Click on my camera, select camera target and move it up in the Z position until the building is centered in my view port here. Okay, Now the building is centred, but the camera is too near. I want to show the whole building, so I will need to go back with my camera now if I selected the camera and tried to move it backward. It won't move, and if I tried to move it using the camera controls here, it won't move either. Why, because it's now attach it to the circle. To solve this issue, I will need toe either scale it like this or increase the radius from the spinners here. Let's scale it till we see the whole building in the view board here. I can also adjust the view using move or rotate for the circle on. Now I have a 360 degree turn table camera movement created. I continue working to fine tune it by adjusting the circle and hiding the distracting bushes and trees and leaving only the villa and part of the landscape surroundings. To make my job easier, I created a new layer called it landscape to hide, made it hidden and use this ad object toe current layer, bottom toe hide more off the unnecessary objects. One of my objects, I had to be attach the needed part and hide the rest. Then I continued hiding other unnecessary elements and other cameras as well to minimize distraction. And now I have my refined camera movement Ready? Let's use control. Plus after plus right click and grabs a timeline toe. Make it 300 frames. Now, if we press play, we will find now that the camera is in a loop, which means that we can make it repeat itself forever without feeling the difference between the first and the last frame. We can make it more interesting if we added some ups and downs in the movement. Here's how. Let's select a circle and converted to split. Then we can go toe the verdicts sub level and move some Vergis is upwards while checking the effect in the View port here, we can also go to the spine level and skill it to make the camera go far. Now my camera is ready. That's create preview animation tools. Grab Vieux Port Creed, preview animation and breast create. Max creates the video and place it in my media player. After watching the video, I realized that some parts off the surroundings get cropped out while rotating. So I fixed that by scaling the circle large enough to fit everything in my friends. I also did some refinements to the points on the circle and increased the timeline toe 400 frames so I can increase my animation frames and get a slower movement. Now my camera is refined and slower on nothing is cropped in the movement. I made that so later on, I can use the an for channel to compose the animated villa on any background. Now let's create a preview animation again. But this time I want the 400 frames and press create. Now we reached our perfect destination. One more step that's Goto the Project folder than preview folder and rename the temporary file to turn table. Next, we will save the max file as the turn table. Toby ready for render Later on. We will also rename our camera toe turntable as well. So that's it for the turntable camera movement technique. Another powerful camera movement toe have in your arsenal. 15. Lecture 15 SPIDER CAM final : camera movement techniques that Spider Cam directors always wanted more control of camera movement. And so do we. That's why the invented drone cameras, cameras on a wire and eventually the spider can. In mags. Things are much easier as we have full control off our camera pauses. Let's learn the spider Cam movement in max. So that's our project from the top. And now I want to animate my camera on a specific path on I want toe. Have full control on it. Let's drew a line and press F 34 wire frame. Let's put points off that line roughly to where I want my camera to move. Let's isolate the line we just throw. It's on the 0 11 Let's move it upward and a Neiers a late. So now it is above our building. While working, I find the navigation in the scene is slow. Let's speed it up. I will make a selection off the day ended port and isolate. Now things are much lighter. To minimize distraction, I will select all de select their large ground right click and isolate selection again. Now it's time to create our camera. Goto create camera, so like veer a press on physical camera and create create the camera near the starting position and the target near the end position targeting the building. Now we have a camera and we have a lying. What we are going to do now is to make the camera follow that pass off the line we just created. To do that, we will go toe animation constraints, past constraints while the camera is selected. Then we will pick the line. Now Max created an animation for the camera with the full lens off our timeline. In our case, at 300 frames, let's examine the movement into view ports. One of them make it top with the extent and the other, we will press, see toe, look from the camera and move the time line bar. As you can see, the camera now moves on the past. We drew for it. Better yet, it is attaching toe that path. If we edited any part off that line, the camera will move along with it, giving us endless possibilities and full control off camera movement. Let's refine our movement by editing that line. First thing first. As a general rule, do not let the Vertex is be corner. Always make them smooth. Let's go toe the line. Goto the verdicts level, select all Vertex is and convert to smooth. Why we did that. Because if the Vergis is is not set to smooth, there will be an annoying sudden shock when the camera reaches that point. That said, toe corner, for example. The other thing is the target is at zero level. Let's move the target up. Abbott Also the camera is too near here. We can fix that by decreasing the focal lens. As a general rule, do not make focal ends less than 18. Let's go with 22. Notice that we can't move our camera further using the move to because the camera is now attaching toe the line. Okay, What if I want to adjust the position off the camera at the first frame? Well, now I will need to move. The virtus is off the line itself. Now I continue adjusting the position off the line, and Virtus is to get a decent first shot for my camera. Do not try to move the camera itself. It's a mistake on Lee moved the line and Vergis is now my control off position will be by moving the line as a whole like this, or by moving the verdicts like that. The other thing that will control the camera framing is the target. Let's select the target and move it to the middle. Let's adjust the target toe. Give us the best possible framing in the first frame. Target can also be animated. Press Oh Toki and give it a key in the first frame. If we move the animations lighter here, we will find that at some point the target needs to be repositioned. Let's select the target and move it. Notice. A key frame has been created here, and the target changes its position through time. Now that we learned all the tricks, let's play. I want the camera to move next to the building, then go through the balcony and end their viewing the back garden. To do that, I will need to adjust every point along the path. Let's go to the first frame, move the point further, giving us a better view. Let's move along the time line and continue adjusting my path. Let's view it here from the top Close. The auto key so the points doesn't get animated. Move this lighter and move the point where the camera is standing. Notice the camera view here while adjusting. Maybe at that point I want the camera here near the building. As I move along the timeline, the camera will reach the next point. I will adjust it from the top for the horizontal position and use disease spinner here toe . Adjust the vertical position, making the camera move in a narrow place, showing these details off the windows. I can also adjust all points from the top to where I want the pass off the camera to be Let's check and oh, there is something wrong here. Camera moved back upwards. That's not what I want. Let's view it from the side. Those points here needs to move down for the past. Toby at the balcony. Let's select these points and move them down. I might also adjust the other point here for eth Mother, Boss, this smoother de better. Let's recheck again. Here is the start, then goes near the building showing the details, then enters the balcony and ends here. The movement is fine, but the last part I don't like it to be looking at the floor like that. To fix that, we need to adjust the position off the target. But more important, I need to add more movement here. I will move these points for my desired movement here. Now I will open the auto key to adjust the position off the target. In the last key frame, I will spend some time to find tune the movement through every point off the line before we continue. I want to explain something here. Let's isolate the camera and the line and pay attention to this. This camera animation off 300 frames are distributed along the lands off the line used. So at frame 300 the camera has to be at the end point off the line and at frayed zero, the camera has to be at the beginning off the line. A problem that may face you is, let's say, at this frame here, the camera is at the middle of the line. If we press on motion, go down toe along the bus. The camera is at exactly 46% off the birth, so I framed 1 40 It's 46 points, something off the pass. Now, if we go toe the line and change it, it's lens. By moving one off the points, the camera position will change to keep up. Being in the middle of the past on that might mess up your camera movement, so it's not recommended to do event right click to undo back to our seen on. Let's check the camera movement on more time. Let's go to frame zero tools Preview. Grab Vieux Port, create preview animation. Make the percentage of the output 100% and press create. Just like all other cameras. We will rename the temporary Videophile toe, keep it from being over written so that set for the Spider Cam camera movement. A full control off your camera movement along the path. 16. LECTURE 17 the vertigo effect: camera movement techniques. The vertigo effect Vertigo Effect is one off the most interesting techniques usually used in horror movies to give the viewer a strong emotional impact In vertigo effect, the camera zooms in on a target, but at the same time, during the zoom, there is a continuous perspective distortion that messes with the mind off the viewer. People watching thinks that they are moving near an object, but the background is moving far away in real life, the youth assuming glance to change the field of view off the camera. In Max, we will do the same. Here's how so Here's our project and for the purpose off this lecture, I added a fountain in front of the villa here. Let's create a physical camera next to the entrance here and the target at the villa. Go to the other view port press, see and adjust the first frame shot in the first frame. I want to show the whole facade off the villa together with the fountain. We will move the camera backward, but we can't go too far because there is a door here. In this case, we will goto the camera properties and decrease the focal ends, giving us a wider view. We will also select camera target and move it upwards, using the spinner on the Z axis. Now the first frame is set nicely. Let's animate the camera first. Let's set the timeline toe 300 frames. Press control plus all plus right click and drag the timeline to the right till it becomes exactly 300. Let's open the auto key Goto frame 300 on Let's move in with the camera using the Dalai Tool. Now that I moved in, I still want the fountain to be. In my view, I will use the middle mouse button to pan the camera downwards. Now the basic animation is created. That trick here is to animate the focal ends here. Let's decrease it till we have a nice and frame. Let's set it to 20 and press enter and let's select the camera target and move it upwards till we have a nice and shot. And now the vertigo effect is created. Camera moves in while the background seems to go far, giving the viewer this strong emotional impact while emphasizing the beauty off the fountain. Let's close the Otaki Goto frame zero. Maximize the View port and go tools Preview. Grab Vieux Port and Crete Preview animation. Check the settings and press create vertigo. Effects can also be done nicely on far cameras, but not as good as zooming in on a target. So that's it for the Vertigo Effect camera movement, one of the best tricks to make an impact on the viewers. 17. LECTURE 19 preview animation final: make preview animation like a pro. Now that we're done with grating our camera movement, it's time to get back to the contact person. Show him or her our work progress on Ask for approvals to continue on the next face. Here is how to prepare your preview videos for the client approval. In our case, I will be using Adobe after Effects version see as six. What we are doing could be done on any editing program, but personally, I prefer aftereffect CIA six. For this job, let's open after effects and prepare our preview animation here. First, I will double click the empty space here under project to import the files. Next, I will navigate toe there, preview animations within earlier in the scores and import one off the cameras. Now this video is imported toe the project library here. Let's drag this video to this small icon called Create new composition and Release. Now, after effects created a new composition with exactly the same settings as the video, same resolution and same duration as you can see the duration off this camera is then seconds toe played in real time press space to love the video to the ram indicated by the green color here. Now this video will be sent to the client toe. Approve the camera movement. But the client usually doesn't understand that this is not the final render quality. To make it easier for us to explain that we will render the first and the last frames in full quality and add them to the video here. So I will be adding a full quality render photo before this video and another one after the video. To do that, I will need toe increase the duration on my timeline. To increase that duration, I will go composition than composition settings are composition setting window will open down here next to duration. I will edit those 10 seconds and make it 14 and press OK. If we zoomed out by dragging this lighter here, we can see that our timeline is now 14 seconds. Let's move the video to start at two seconds, we will go here and make it to and press Enter now. The current time indicator is exactly positioned at two seconds. Now we can drag the video and if we press shift, it will snap the beginning off the video to the time indicator at two seconds. Now we have two seconds at the beginning and two seconds at the end. It's time to bring in our rendered images for the first and the last frames. Let's double click here to import and navigate toe our rendered images I have here rendered images off frame zero and frame 300. Select them both and press open. Now they are imported here in my project library. Select the first frame and drag it to the timeline above our video. Now the image is placed with the whole duration off. The timeline. Hover your mouse at the end, tip and drag to decides the image duration press shift to snap the end of the image to the beginning off the video. Also, grab frame 300 drag it to the timeline above our video. We can also drag it while pressing shift to snap the beginning of the photo to the end of the video. If we press space, we will have a video off to second rendered photo, 10 seconds preview animation and two seconds off rendered photo as well to find tomb. This video. A good idea is to make the photo slowly fades in instead of a sudden cut to do this. First, I will zoom in the timeline using this bottom. Next, I will move that I'm indicator to two seconds and 15 frames and increase the duration off the photo to make it overlap The video. I will also do the same toe the end photo and make it override the end off the video by 15 frames. Now it's time to make them faith out and fade in first, I will move my time indicator toe the beginning off the video and select the layer off the first photo. Then I will click on this arrow here than the arrow next to transforms. Go down toe opacity. Then I will click on the stopwatch here plays a key frame off opacity off 100% at that point off time. Then I will move my time indicator to the end of the photo and changed the opacity value toe 0%. Now there is a key frame here off a pass city 100% and one there off 0% and automatically after effects makes the transition through these 15 friends We will do the same for the end picture. But this time we will do it in reverse. I will select the layer, put my time indicator in the beginning, opened the arrow and transforms goto opacity and press the stopwatch. But this time I would make the key frame record 0% opacity, then go to the end off the movie and make the opacity 100%. And here is that transition and now the client will understand that the preview animation will be rendered in higher quality. Now the video for this camera is ready. I can make the same for all off the cameras and send them to my client for review. But first I need to save this as a video to save this as a video, I will press composition, then add to render queue. Now they render queue settings will appear here. I will press on the orange writing next to output module to set video type settings. When this window appears, I will goto format and choose Etch 0.264 Usually the default is every I, but we will make it explain to 64 We can also go toe the format options goto the bit rate settings and make them six higher numbers with increased video size. Lower numbers will decrease video quality and press OK. Now this X 0.264 will produce video off MP four format. A very good quality video with reasonable size to send on the Internet. Remember, if you added audio to the timeline, you will check audio output here and press OK, now we are done with the settings. Press on the orange writings next to the output to to choose where to save the video on your hard disk. I will navigate to my desktop, named the Video and press safe. Now we are ready to render press render and wait till it finish. Now I can goto the desktop and plate, and here is our video, ready to be sent to the client. Let's check the video size by right click properties. We find it a 10.5 mayors that size is easy to be sent over the Internet using emails. If it's bigger than your email limits, there are many Web site that can help you uploading large files. One of these sites called We transfer. It can upload upto two Vega's for free Goto we transfer dot com agreed to the terms Type clients, email, a message and your email press. Add your files from here, navigate to the desktop and select the file Press open and then transfer. Wait till it gets 100% and now your file is uploaded and sent to the client. This side sends a link to your email on the client's email and keeps this link active for seven days. If I goto my email inbox, I will find an email from we transfer file Send to Client and the download link here when the client clicks on that link, here is what will open the simplest website to press download. So that's how to make and send preview animation like a pro. Repeat that for all the preview animation cameras and you are good to go 18. CONCLUSION: congratulations. You have now completed Phase one in the architectural animation course. You now have the informations and skills in three areas off the protests business, technical and cinematics on the business parts. You learned how to communicate with clients and make the deals, as well as planning your workflow and having a storyboard. As a guideline on the technical ports, you learn some cool tips in max and after effects that gets the work done easily and smoothly on the cinematic parts, You now have some off the best camera movement techniques used by professional directors. Although this face looks like it is easy and simple, it is in fact the most important phase of all. For example, without making a good deal that is financially satisfying to you with the good planned time frame, things probably will not go well. But on the other hand, if you used the principles in the scores, making good deals, having everything planned out, impressing your client with the cinematic knowledge that you got, then things will go well. Even if you had to outsource the jobs like rendering and post production to other professionals, you will be still making good money Thanks for watching this course. I hope you have enjoyed this learning experience with me looking forward for your feedback and reviews. If you need any help, feel free to contact me for any questions. I am Mohamed Hashem. Thank you and goodbye.