Blender GIS: animating a digital elevation model

in this video we're gonna look into animation in blender almost everything can be animated so for instance we can animate a light to create an animation like this one or we can animate the properties of the material to make an animation like this one the purpose of both of these animation is to enhance the viewer's perception of certain small features of a terrain so for this video you will be working with a new data set that we haven't been working with before you will find them in the folder dem for animation this is the data set that's also being used in the example animation and it is a highly detailed lidar recording of an archaeological site murro tenente in southern italy it's a rna defensive circuit and due to the high resolution of the recording it allows us to play with the visualization of small morphological features so let's get started so if you follow the previous videos you are familiar now with the process of importing uh georeferenced digital elevation data into blender first we will delete the default cube go to gis import georeferenced raster data go to the folder then for animation and here you will find two options so if you have a very slow weak computer you choose the mortenente dem clipped it's a smaller version of the digi elevation model and if you have a bit of a stronger computer you choose the full one so you probably know what your computer is capable of based on the previous videos so we will choose them as a displacement texture and otherwise we keep it the same way import it as you see we have the same problem as previous in the previous video the digital elevation model or the mesh that's created is of relatively low resolution and we know now why this is this is because of a setting and modifiers so in order to create a higher resolution mesh you simply add multiple modifier multiple subdivision subdivisions on top of the already present one set it to simple and crank up the levels and as you can see this will load well yes and as you can see it will reveal the defensive and santa and the center uh excavation um so before we move on giving a material and color to this uh terrain i want to talk a little bit more about some alternative visualization modes um as you have already seen in the previous video here you can change the base basic visualization or shading mode as they call them blender while we are in solid shading we can also have multiple options so rather you can here also change the type of shading which already can do a lot to the perceptibility of certain features on the terrain also the medcap one can be very useful these are all used for modeling in order for the modelers to see their meshes better and they can be used for us as well in a similar manner because our aims are very similar to the modeler that wants to have a very good view on small details mistakes features of his or her models so you can switch between studio lighting and so called madcap material capture lighting and it gives you a whole range of options that you can explore another interesting way of visualizing your mesh is turning on cavity cavity is a type of rendering that enhances sharp features in the mesh so in this case there are ridges which are the sort of the higher part edges the things that stick out in the valleys the things that are deeper and you can turn up the sharpness of this and this this is another very effective way to visualize uh details of a terrain all right let's go colorizing our did to elevation model so go to gis node terrain analysis it creates the nodes as we've seen in previous video we just have to switch to viewport shading or we can no we have to switch a viewport shading so as you may remember to change the color here you have to go to the material settings on the right and open up the color ramp and here you can additional stops to change the location and the color this time i leave you to this by yourself as you already know how this sort of works but try to fire eye with the distance between the colors which can give you this kind of interesting effects so just add a couple of stops experiment with different types of color and come back to me when you have something that you like all right so even though we have a nicely colored plane it looks a bit flat and that's because it lacks shading it lacks shadows and that's because it lacks a light of course we have the default lighting that's part of this shading mode that lights the entire surface equally but we need a sunlight in order to cast shadows so hit shift so hit shift a and add a sunlight hit g and then that in order to drag it up to the above the mesh and after that we can turn on the rendered shading mode if you still have cycles on you can turn ev on if that goes quicker for you so with the sunlight selected we can drag the yellow ball to change the direction of the sun we can also change the strength of the sun and go in top down view now you can also for instance hit r to rotate the direction of the sun and as you can see this gives you already a little bit of the effect that i was looking for in the animation this kind of light is most effective and it is very it's under a very low angle so we can even make the angle even sharper and rotate so we're ready to animate something as said before in blender it is possible to animate nearly every property of every object so for instance the movement of an object is very easily animated so how does this process of animation work like well to show you a very simple example i will turn off the sun and turn on this point light that i have here and i'm gonna animate its movement from the right side to the left side so basically what you have to do is to work with keyframes so keyframes are points in time in which the state of an object or property is recorded i will show you how this works so in order to add a keyframe on its location because that's what we're basically going to do we're going to animate its location from here to there we have to open up this panel on the side go to item and with the point light selected we can see here the location and where we want to animate the x location of this point light in that direction so in order to add a keyframe we just have to hover over the property that we want to animate and hit i and the property location turns green now that means it is keyframed you can see this as well in the timeline below if you do not have a timeline at the bottom of your screen and your screen looks like this uh press on the little arrow here on the corner and then change this window to timeline and these points in the timeline these dots these represent the keyframes so the easiest way to animate the location of the lamp from here to there is to go to move the timeline to a frame in the future then move the object you want to animate to the location where you want to animate it to and then go here and hit i again and now new keyframes are created at frame 250. so if we go back now in the timeline with this button you see it jumps back to this keyframe where we created a keyframe on this location and we can hit play now and you see the lamp starts to move over the surface all right let's get back to the sun turn off the point light turn on the sunlight and in this case we don't want to animate the location but we want to animate the rotation and this basically is the same process so make sure that at the beginning of the animation starts at zero on the timeline and then we can go into top down view we make a keyframe at this rotation by hovering over the rotation and hitting i it takes a while yes it made it a keyframe now we can use the rotate to or hit r to rotate this in like a full 360. and what we should have done this before first move the timeline then make the rotation then hit i then go back and hit play and as you can see we get a full rotation so sometimes you may wish to change the properties for instance the angle of the sun in this case the angle of the sun is related to the rotation of the sun so we can better delete the the the keyframes that are in here so if you want to delete all the keyframes we simply go right button on the fields that is containing the keyframe so you can say here clear keyframes so to make it the visualization better i increased the strength of the sun and i increased the angle even more so now we have a very good view of all the small morphological features that this terrain contains so we go back and we do the same thing again with animation you can do this yourself you also may wish to change the length of the animation as you can see now it only animates or plays the area between 0 and 250 it plays a maximum of 250 frames if you want to increase the number of frames that are in the animation you can do that over here so it starts at 1 and enters 250 and you can drag this field to make it as long as you want and in fact you can also drag keyframes so if you want to make the animation go over a longer period of time you can simply box select these these keyframes and then hit g like with object moving object and just move it to another location on the key on the timeline and this will drag out the same animation over a longer period of time so it will basically make your animation slower okay now we have animated the rotation of the sun we also want to animate the change of the color of the terrain so how to do that well basically the same way as you animated the sun make sure you go back to zero in the timeline then select the material properties and what we have to do now is to animate the position of these stops so the position is of this one is point zero three five this is zero and this is one so as you can see if i move this stop to the right or to the left the position changes so we can animate this so for instance if we want to animate the current position of this stop we hit i and just to be sure we also animate the other stops because we will have to move those as well then i go to the end of my animation which is at oh let's uh of 458 i change these to something like this so the red is replaced by the blue and then the green and then while i'm here i hit i for this keyframe i for that one and i for that one then i go back it starts slowly and there it goes so if you want to increase the speed of this animation we simply select the last keyframes and drag them a little bit back and we play it again and as you may notice this animation of the changing color of the terrain occurs at the same time as the rotation of the sun so there's two things happening in this in the scene at the same time when you're happy with your animation the only thing that remains is to export the animation in a movie format so how to do this well the first thing that we have to do is to add a camera to record this animation so shift a and then camera the camera is now somewhere over here but i showed you already before in a previous video the trick to getting the camera to the point of view of the where you are now so um we are going to record this animation from top down so i'm going to go into this position and with the camera selected i go to view a line view align active camera to view now the camera doesn't see anything is because it's too far away from the landscape so add this to 10 000 and there we go we see it so in this case we also may want to change the location of the camera somewhat we're going out of camera view and we also make the camera a little bit bigger so we can see it better in the viewport so we go here viewport display and we make it uh 50 meters and there we are there we have the our camera and we get a two bar we moved a little bit to the right so it is better above yes that's about right now we have to zoom out a little bit and a good way to zoom in or out is to change the focal length of the camera if you wish so you can also change it to an orthographic perspective but then you will have to change the scale a lot this is a real top-down view of the camera move it a little bit to the right go back into camera view um and we want to coverage this entire area that means that we have to change the resolution to a more square format so we make the y resolution a little bit higher this is done in the output properties we also can i change the orthographic scale a little more something like this all right now we're ready to export animation so as discussed in the previous video there's two rendering engines to be used when you're exporting animation or images so i can simply go and use the current rendering engine and the ev1 however the ee cycles one will give you better results in terms of shadows the eevee shadows as you have seen are a little bit coarse there are ways to uh improve the shadows in ev of course and this you have to go to the sun and then [Music] go to the lighting settings shadow and well first change 700 so as i had discussed in the previous video there are actually two rendering engines the ev1 and the cycles one and how we've been working with even because it visualizes faster in the viewport but the quality of the renderings are slightly worse you can see it for instance with the shadows here they are a little bit coarse and pointy well if you turn on cycles it takes longer but the shadows and colors in general look a little bit better now there are ways to improve the shadow uh representation in ev so we have to go to the render settings on in ev and then from this last list of render settings you go to shadows and then increase the cascade size and basically eevee sort of stores the shadow information on on maps on texture maps flat maps so the larger this map is the higher the resolution so the higher the resolution of the shadow so if we turn it up to 4096 we get already a better result all right we're going back into camera view and replay back our animation and then last look if we're satisfied all right so to set up the rendering you have to go to output properties and under output it stores now in a temporary file which you have to hit the folder and then make a new location and new folder call it animation accept and a file format we don't want png because then it will output a series of png images rather than a video we want an ff mpeg video which is a nice format to share videos like videos sort of the basic settings are alright before you hit the render button there are two other things you have to take care of before you forgot one of these things is that if you render it as it is i will show you what happens you get an image like this this is not that the resolution or is too low or that there is some kind of out of focus camera in use no this is because the digital elevation model was not put to the maximum levels of subdivision for the render so go to the this one here to the modifier panel and set the levels of subdivision to an appropriate level okay that's the first thing and then there's another thing we had a still a point light from the example animation from the beginning of this video in our scene if you start rendering now you will see that the point out will appear even though it is invisible so click here turn on the rendering restriction toggle and make sure that it is out of the render now you're set and you can start with your rendering so render image one more time to check if it is if there are no mistakes yes everything seems fine now we're ready to render for real render animation so now you have to wait it has to render a few hundred images so that may take a while so grab a coffee or lunch or dinner or whatever you like and return when it's finished so if the process is really slow for you as it is for me in this case there's two things that you can do you can simply forget about rendering the camera you can go to view and then a viewport render animation that will also work and it will go a bit quicker and another thing that you can do is to downgrade the resolution of the image so for instance the x and the y dimensions of the output properties here so a quick way to do this is you can add mathematical equations in here so we add divided by two and this one also divided by it will just lower the resolution it will not change the size of the camera and with this resolution you can try to render again so with this you've come to the end of the last video of this online course on 3d visualization of gis data inside blender i hope you learned something that you can use in your own work or that you enjoyed it of course there is way more to learn about lighting about creating materials about animating in blender but i leave further exploration of the amazing possibilities of blender up to you for now thank you for your attention and effort and see you next time

Channel: 4D Research Lab

Views: 3,482

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Id: ch46g-iZDUg

Length: 30min 16sec (1816 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 23 2020