Creating Animations in Vectorworks 2020

hello everyone welcome to today's novice webinar creating animations in bacter works 2020 bacter works is more than a fast and accurate cross-platform CAD drafting program it is also a robust 3d modeling tool in this webinar we will discover tools now available in dr. works that allow you to interactively present 3d models to your clients with animated cameras and video presentation this should be nice and let me tell you a little bit of our our presenter Jacob Dale is formally educated as an entertainer designer and architect with twenty plus years of experience applying back to work software to design and planning projects Jacob and his team tangibly work remotely to coach professionals around the world on optimize work workflows with back to works no badge is changing the way designers purchase 3d software offering more choices more freedom based assistance faster service and most importantly no headaches you can see now our product page where you can find back the works the entire product line which ever back to works you need we have it and this is the product page of Jacob's trainings and stay tuned because in the next few days they'll be updates and they'll be more offering so just search for tangibly on our catalogue and you'll have plenty of choices also I want to inform everybody of a last-minute sale that was sprung on us and we're very excited about this back towards discount 30% and it's relief for basically everybody there is very few exception so prospect upgraders an existing VSS customer can receive and take advantage of this discount so give us a call or email PW promo and ovitch comm to find out more and now without further ado I'm going to switch my screen and let Jacob take the center stage take it away Jacob alright it looks like I have the main presenter view here can you see the icon of discussion bubbles awesome beautiful hi Barbara Jacob here thanks for calling me in today this is always an exciting experience quite a unique experience this time around I know we've been doing webinars with y'all for quite a few years now this is one of the most unique than I can think of considering the circumstances welcome everybody else to this event I'm trying to make it as much of an event as possible because well as you are aware I don't have to explain to you all the other events are not available at this moment there's a lot of online stuff happening right now though there's actually quite a bit that has happened in the past on no veg all of the previous webinars that are available or that have been done with no veg are still available on our website so beyond things that I've recorded with no veg Barbara especially in the past there's also great content on related to Vectorworks and other event planning software including auto cad etc so you know what the resources are there at no veg or I think you might have a clue because you're on this call today so welcome again to everyone so my name's Jacob as Barbara said I'm with tangibly I started this company nearly six years ago now because I just felt like there could be better resources in the environment of events and entertainment and learning well I kind of specialize really deeply in Vectorworks spotlight among some other things but that's specifically what we're going to talk about today we're gonna make animations in Vectorworks spotlight now some of you may be using Vectorworks just for like 2d work some drafting work what we specialize on at tangibly is coaching and training individuals and teams to just really become professional users of Vectorworks now we typically teach in-person workshops or we have up until 2020 and for reasons that I don't really need to elaborate on we're not doing in-person workshops right now we're kind of we've been working toward this potential situation for a few years now we actually have built a handful of interactive master classes on Vectorworks spotlight and if you go to tangibly comm and click on interactive master classes they're in the header it's a little bit more description they're not trying to make this a sales pitch at all just letting you know there are other resources available related to today's webinar we've actually built a study guide in the backend and so for those of you watching this video today during the live broadcast you are welcome to go to tangibly dot-com and click on study guides and then enroll in this study guide for free today when you enroll if it is today the day we went live you'll just see coming soon because we're basically going to upload fee we're going to upload the recording from today's session and then we'll support that with some other videos and some of the exports and files supporting files that we can't necessarily share in real time today on this webinar but there's also going to be a link to that on the know veg site and here in the study guide we'll have a link back to the resources on Novik so fully linking all of that so if you're joining me here today you may have some kind of interest in animating Vectorworks spotlight now what does that mean well it could mean many different things you might have a product you want to display to a client typically well I guess the common thread for most of us whether you're in event planning or you're doing lighting design or you're in set design for movies and really all of the in-between you're presenting to a client at some point they're gonna be signing off that check for the work that you do and the better that you can pardon me the better that you can illustrate your work to your client I just believe the more successful that your business is going to be so we're going to work with that today we're going to work in the Vectorworks environment I really love three modeling and Vectorworks it's I just like using all of the tools in one piece of software I know there's other tools out there other pieces of software that can do certain facets a little different maybe a little better maybe not as good but what I try to do is remain in the vertical of Vectorworks spotlights specifically so that's what we're going to be talking about today but it doesn't mean that I don't rely on some other resources so here's a quick peek into Vectorworks really quickly we're in an isometric view and I'm just looking at a project that we're gonna actually walk through today I'm feeling a little bit of well I'm just missing the village I'm missing the town I've lived in a lot of really vibrant communities here in the US and travel to a lot around the world and so I can only imagine that everyone that's tuned in today or in the future is either experiencing this now or remembering the time when they were all just well at a distance from their community so I was just kind of thinking well I've got a 3d engine here and I've got a way to animate views in that world so why don't I just kind of find a fictitious world a little village a little town we can go visit this digitally together as best we can with Vectorworks at the moment and hopefully we have a little bit of a community experience here so full circle of the community well Vectorworks has the ability as of about five years now can import Sketchup files and I actually rely on a resource on the web now I know this isn't exactly 100% Vectorworks right I said I only work within Vectorworks for this type of modeling but the great thing is you if you can import Sketchup models that have already been built you can at least get an idea across to your team or to your client for the next design meeting so that's really what I was trying to focus on in this example and so what I did is I went to 3d warehouse dot Sketchup comm here it is they're pretty easy I'm copy and paste that into the chat let's see if I can do that real time there's the chat icon now opening for me while I'm presenting okay so pretty easy to do 3d warehouse Sketchup calm if you don't type it right at least Google will get it correct for you so I you may have to login to 3d warehouse they want to capture a little bit of information from you but it's a great resource I'd recommend go ahead go ahead and create an account well I went to 3d warehouse Sketchup comm and I clicked in the search bar up here and I just typed small town I'm looking for a small village feel some kind of sense of community and I there's quite a few results here you can really get all varies variations of very well articulated models here's one with some folks walking by looks like maybe a police car there's this helicopter seems to be a recurring theme I think that's fun very cool make a James Bond commercial and some of your some of your time there at home but you know just scrolling through here you see a whole variety of models and one of them that really struck a chord with me was this small town area just modeled very nicely it's presented by BTM so all the users that upload models here are featured so I clicked on that model there and definitely liked it gave some props to BTM for a rather interesting model and reminds me of some of the I guess low poly video games I played let's just say a decade ago probably longer than that but now being that Vectorworks is my video game let's see if we can have some fun with it so if you click on any of the models that you might choose you're welcome to find this model if you desire so you can follow along or re-watch this later and go step-by-step through the process but you're welcome to download this model or download one of your own so what we're gonna do is click on the download button here now remember you're going to need to be logged into 3d warehouse otherwise at this moment when you click to download one of these files it's gonna ask you for your great an account so 6 and 1/2 dozen there so a little tip on downloading Sketchup models to then import into vector works is consider the the version of vector works that you are working with I'm personally working with Vectorworks 2020 right now service pack one of the recent service packs so we're in vector where it's 2020 and the reason why I'm talking about this is because for some reason sometimes Sketchup models that are the most current model don't necessarily work the best in vector works so we have to step it back one year just to you limit the incompatibilities so it usually seems to work for me so just a little tip there we're going to go for Sketchup 2019 model I've already downloaded this we have a Sketchup model and what we want to do is import that in to vector works so we get something like this this is one of the models but I'm going to go through the the steps of importing that Sketchup model so you can see I'm not playing any tricks here so what what I'm going to do is just go to new I'm going to create a blank document here in vector works not worrying too much about the organization of this file at the moment and I see my page center there I'm going to go ahead and import my Sketchup model so file and then we'll go to import and then all the way down at the bottom of this actually really robust list of import file formats we see Sketchup down there at the bottom so we're gonna say import Sketchup and then my challenge here is to find the location of this file while we're on this call live okay there we go and open that was pretty quick alright so importing a Sketchup model you have some options here you may consider this if you're looking more at a kind of architectural use and the model of importing you believe is to be actually a rather I guess let's say well the professionally developed model right then maybe you would choose architectural objects that is going to give horizontal planes slab or it will make slabs out of them in vector works and then your vertical planes will also turn into walls results may differ right based on the model that you're actually putting into the engine so for this particular example I just want to use meshes and 3d polygons this treats the model a little bit more like it would just be seen in Sketchup so we're gonna go to tongue-tied let me go ahead and get a drink of water here so I know I am kind of running through this pretty quick but it's a very exciting tool and we've actually got less than 45 minutes left on this call I want to spend the next 30 minutes actually just going through the workflow is this project based it's the same type of training that we do on our master classes you also see in the study guide if you go ahead and roll in that right now today or when you watch this video in the future so we're gonna walk through this for the next about 30 minutes approximately and then we're gonna leave kind of in the last 15 minutes for some reflection questions and maybe some for examples so I'm an importing this small town that I downloaded from Sketchup in 2019 format I'm opening it as a mesh three poly and then taking the risk of actually doing this live you know that's that is risky I you know have the potential of crashing but I'm gonna go ahead and push it anyway I've tested this a couple of times in the last few days just to make sure that I can open this model just fine and not have any issues but I cannot guarantee that something may be out of whack and we might crash if that happens I'll log back in we'll get a little intermission and if I disappear go ahead and post some questions to Barbara there and then we'll patch me back in so just a little uh a little forewarning it might happen working with 3d modeling and working with video exports you're just putting a lot more pressure on your GPU I actually use an external GPU set up not to make the video about that but just let me know my computer has a little bit more modeling capability because of that external GPU setup so I'm going to go into a 3d view here I used shift C as the shortcut in fact I could turn on some displays here for you all so you can see those keyboard shortcuts let me go back to top plan here and shift C switches me to a flyover view and I can see this model this is what I directly imported from Sketchup into BEC 2 works so we're now seeing that 3d model here in vector works and we and save this file as a small village or you know add it to another project or you can add more models from sketchup whatever you feel is necessary to represent this initial scene on your computer what we're going to move into next is actually drawing a pathway through this small town through the little streets and in animate that that pathway as a movie export so let's take a look at that you so you got to see my face there kind of pondering what the next step would be I pre recorded this but I wanted to you go ahead in okay there we go we've got Vectorworks quit on me I'm pushing a little bit too much on the graphics at the moment opening the video at the same time but we can reopen that in the background while I'm showing you this video let's do that the risk of doing live demonstrations but I'm all for it okay Vectorworks is opening in the background there we go so I'm gonna scan through this screen recording that I did real quick and we're just I'm giving you a preview of what we're about to do impact works in case you're pressed for time you got another appointment you can at least see into the feature here and see we were about to get into so what I've done is drawn a path using a polygon inside or a polyline on the model that we've downloaded from Sketchup so this is a Sketchup model I've drawn that in vector works and you know just basically plan my rote route through the the small village there so we're gonna do that live now in vector works with polyline and then we're to convert that into a camera path object but I do need to wait for Vectorworks to reopen for me oh it looks like it's ready and I can open file you so I'm going to go ahead and open one of the files that I've already created in the past because it looks like we on that crash we lost our file and I'm going to try to restore a file at this time just waiting for that to open and Vectorworks okay here we are I know we're kind of a few steps ahead but I just want to make sure that we pulled up a working file here what I can do is I'll delete that so we can't see into the future here too far but if I back out we'll see that we have the the small village I've actually duplicated it I've made it a symbol and kind of mirrored it and rotate it around to make a little bit more of a village here to make it more of an interesting environment so that's kind of fun so going back to top plan I'd like to plan a route starting from these these are actually boat docks here so I'm going to change this to top plan okay just do that there on the keypad or the numeric keypad I want to start on this boat dock and walk into the village let's just imagine where James Bond and we arrived by boat and we're going in here to find find the villain right so let's imagine the villain is standing up here on this balcony here so you have to get from the boat we'll put a boat in later on on the replay of this but we're on the study guide but imagine there's a boat here for the moment at the boat walkthrough this archway and then maybe miss the the pathway between the buildings and turn back around and go around the corner and look up and notice the balcony there so what I need to do is again go back to top plan I can the small town that I've drawn or the model is actually in a different design layer so I have a design layer one is where I want to draw my camera path I've created a class called camera path and I'm going to place my path in that class so next I'm going to go to the polyline tool so a polyline tool is number five on your keyboard and then simply I can just click and draw the path that I want to take through the model so I'm clicking there on the boat dock we go around the building here I'm technically yes you could also do this in OpenGL but things just seem to move faster if you're in wireframe so this is a large archway the brick archway we're going to go underneath that so I have the polylines will activate it and I'm actually not holding down the cursor at the moment the polyline tool will keep clicking on vertices until you double-click or hit escape so we're just adding vertices in each one of these is a point on our path as we walk through so I'm going to click here or click here we're actually not even using a camera tool at the moment this is simply just the polyline tool so I'm just panning up here and I know this is a little breezeway here's the balcony that I was referring to in 3d so we're gonna step out into this corridor in turn and maybe take another step and then look up at this balcony so I double-clicked will see that we have this kind of odd-looking shape that is the path that we're planning for our camera and I don't need it to be solid I can turn off the fill there so now I just have a polyline and I noticed that it is a polyline because there in the object info pallet it says polyline so with the polyline selected we want to go up to the menu bar and go to model and create animation here's the magic right here this is where the tool lives in Vectorworks so you can draw a NURBS curve or you can draw a polyline and create an animation out of that polyline so pretty simple you go to the menu bar click on model go to create animation and then create walkthrough path from selection that's the first option here is what we're covering today so create walkthrough path from selection if you're watching your drawing area you may notice a subtle change in your polyline and that is that it is sprouted a triangle over here to the lower right on my screen you may notice a little zoom in a little bit that is actually the camera field of view so your polyline has now changed to an animation path so in the object info pallet with the animation path selected we see that it says animation path there in the object info pallet so we have now a camera on a path and you may be wondering you know well how do i how do I actually look at that animation there's a couple different ways we can do that and I'll mention one but don't do it just yet so there is a the ability to simply activate the camera view here in the object info pallet but what they will do is change your drawing area to the active camera view and you'll be seeing exactly what the camera sees now yes that will work for you but a workflow that I think is a little bit more useful for production environments in multi-user environments maybe everybody's crowding around the screen kind of planning this shot I would recommend clicking on the button just below that and that is open camera view in new pane so I think within the last it's been the last two years that Vectorworks has been able to do multi view pane which is really great so I clicked on at that little button and this is what I get this is my camera view at the first keyframe so that was the first point that I clicked with the polyline creates the first keyframe for my camera view so what it's done is open a new view pane I can't actually move this view pane I can move it off to another screen well I'm just working in a one screen environment here so what I want to do is hover down near the corner of the view pain and get that double arrow and I want to resize this so I'm gonna bring the resolution down I'm gonna resize it so it's a little bit more visible you know on top of the the plan the site plan so now that I have this view pane minimized I know that the view pane is active because clicking on the header there it is highlighted in blue so this view pane is the active view right now and with by clicking on an open camera view in new pane previously it actually activated the camera view in that small view pane so we have the view and you might think ok well what's next I actually want to watch this short video that I just made so easily well in the object info pallet we'll see a button that says play pretty self-explanatory it's not highlighted in a different color that would be kind of cool if it was like a play button it was green or had a play icon or something but just playing text in the object info pallet we click play and watch the small window that we have their little picture in picture so you might be thinking you know that's just that's ok but it's really jumpy and I would agree with you the idea here is to just get iterations out of the overall concept so this is what generally works in production environment is you come up with a concept and you iterate on that until it's ready for production so the idea here is that you're just kind of getting a rough draft of what that walkthrough is going to look like but next what you're going to want to do is actually fine tune that walkthrough so it's a little bit more presentable a little more digestible to the clients or to your production team so how do we do that you might be asking we can do that with this tool but not through the object info pallet so what I want to do is deactivate the camera view that's first up because if I start clicking around it's gonna move the camera I don't want to move the camera in that way so I'm going to deactivate the camera view and then I'm gonna go to my drawing area and xx on my keyboard will deselect the camera view and it actually get me my selection tool so I can hover over the camera object so it actually deselected my cursor was just happening to hover over that so it looked like it was still selected but I'm hovering over the camera object there which is actually an animation path that's technically not called a camera in Vectorworks but on this animation path you select it by clicking once but if we want to reshape that object we can either use the reshape tool in the object in the basic tool set here we'll see the reshape tool here and - is the keyboard shortcut for the reshape tool what I typically do if an object has a reshape capability I will just simply double click on that object it may not look like much has changed but if you've been paying attention to the mode bar up here at the top it did change quite a bit we have different options now we were actually now in the reshape tool of that animation path so reshaping this animation path is actually going to change it into a free fly camera so it's going to be a little bit heavier on your file because we're effectively changing the the polyline into more of a smooth bezzie a spline or NURBS curve and that just has more points on it and so therefore Vectorworks has more to think about we're gonna see that warning in just a moment so with the reshape tool we can either move the vertex which is all of the points here on that animation path we can simply just click on them and move them maybe we wanted to get a little bit closer to the water there okay we reshape this animation path and now it's saying ok it's gonna become a fly freely path I don't know if I've seen it spelled that way before but fry fly freely say that 10 times fast ok so it's a free fly path fright fly freely wow I can't say that not enough coffee today okay so we're almost again we're about halfway through Barbara I'm pretty sure there's some pressing questions up to this point maybe not there's a couple of comments I mean one for Neal barman any photo it might be worth pointing out that free models provided such as those provided by 3d warehouse may only be made so well as they rely on the skills of the Creator so if they're made poorly back to works and other application might might have difficulty dealing with them what do you think yeah I think that's a great point thanks Neal for bringing that up I was trying to describe that but not in as eloquently as you were able to encapsulate it but basically that's what I you know Ruth results may vary if you're bringing in a model it was created by something else you just don't know at what level of detail it was created level of accuracy so we're just kind of using a Sketchup model to get the concept across but I think in a production environment a professional environment you'd probably lean more on your own generated content for these type of things so but yes great great point you know thanks for bringing that up and then Robert is asking what is the keystroke app oh yeah Robert thanks for asking so I use a small app it's called Mouse paws a and I don't know if this actually works in the most current mac OS version they talked about having updates to that but I'm like one version behind on mac OS I know that's a bad habit but I have a certain video game I like to play that only works on that version and when I update to the next Mac OS that video game goes away forever so right now I'm using Mouse paws a that's the the little app and it's spelled not suppose a like that and then there's all kinds of customizations there that you can add you can change highlight colors and how big your text is and all that so that's been a really helpful tool it's not free but it's worth paying good designers for their work okay I don't think of Robert I think Robert is Catalina and he says it doesn't work on Catalina am i correct okay yeah they may not have the update out for Catalina just yet so but I expect them to soon it's been a robust tool a lot of folks that do presenting use it quite a bit so I'm happy to recommend it it's actually a great tool so I'm hoping they have a plugin for it soon for the new Catalina okay now that's it for now okay okay excellent well thanks for the little break I appreciate you all being involved because I was wanting this to be interactive as much as possible and it's great to hear some friendly names out there in the audience so good to hear y'all wish I could Co maybe next time but thanks for attending today alright we got a few more things it's not over just yet you might be saying hold on a minute you got like 20 more minutes in this broadcast I'm not going anywhere we've got a few more things to do what we were doing is reshaping the animation path and it went into free Fri I'll just call it free Fri flea fly it's a little joke just having fun with y'all today it the animation path changed into a different type of camera but really the interface is pretty much the same as we see here and back to work so thanks for the dialogue there Vectorworks engineers keeping us on our toes I moved the vertex of the camera path and I'm going to do that one more time just to recap we can click on a vertex we're reshaping that animation path and I just want to tighten up that that path there but what I really want to do is change the the smoothness of this path so what I'm going to do is I'm going to click on this few up here and activate the camera we're gonna walk through it one more time and imma show you what I mean so we're animating this through you may not see it based on the bandwidth that you have today really jerky it's really fast some of that jerkiness of the of the camera is that it's the vertices are angular and what we want to do is change those into splines so that the cameras follows the path rather than just swinging about in an instant to a new view soma deactivate that camera view one more time double X on the keyboard and we're to go back and select that animation path well if you just selected it you might realize oh my modes here that's not well it's just looking at your right you have to double click on the object or use the reshape tool and you will see okay go away a header bar there we go we got some modes here the mode I actually want to use is the change vertex mode so that's a little dot there with little arrows rotating around it and if we hover over these change vertex or these vertices with the change vertex mode if we click on it it becomes a curve or spline so we can click on those points to smooth out the camera at these really sharp points and we get more of a natural movement to our camera in fact I can take out most of these points if I want to where they're sharp and then I can move the control point of the Bezier spline but I have to actually go back to the first mode so if you know this using the letter U on your keyboard you can change modes in a tool but I can also click there and now I can grab this control point and say okay little too close to the water zoom in in case y'all are watching and lower resolution the the path was a little bit too close to the edge there as you might remember that as the edge of the water and we can move these control points to get a little bit smoother of a path okay so we've changed our vertices to Bezier splines we don't have the complication of deciding what type of arc spline whatever it is if you want that level of control start with the polyline tool and actually draw draw your curves or splines or arcs how you would wish them to be before you convert that a polyline into an animation path so we have the animation path is active right now but I want to click on my other view my custom view design layer - one we see here and I can enlarge this just a little bit so we can get a better preview of this video but I don't want to overlap the the path so cinch that up just a little bit more okay I've actually moved the camera so one thing to keep in mind so that's a little foreshadowing is if you scroll or move your cursor or anything like that in this active camera view then it's going to change the focus of the camera so keep that in mind what I want to do first is play through that path and see if it looks a little bit smoother so let's click play now isn't that odd so we're seeing the animated camera move along the path but it's no longer active in this view so we have to activate camera one more time and then now play so kind of an odd workflow there but you just have to activate it you have to tell vector works one more time no this is really what we're up to so you may have noticed it's actually kind of going fast but those little turns a little more subtle so that comes from you know taking the edge out of these out of these vertices on the animation path so you may be saying all right well the duration of my video it's just really fast it's actually set to five seconds right now in the object info pallet you can change that on the fly and we're going to change that to 15 seconds and then we can hit tab so director Works recognizes that as an input and then we go back and hit play one more time we're taking our time this time nice little stroll through town looking about and there is the final scene so if we want to fine-tune these views so we've created our path very simply from a polyline we've walked through town we've met with our design team and they agree okay that's definitely the best path through town all of those shots just work out really nicely we're gonna go with that so you say all right well let me plan out some more of the the views along the path you may have noticed the camera kind of meandering around as we went so what I want to do is I can deactivate this camera view right now and on the camera path so select the camera path back to the selection tool and I want to skip backward to the beginning and now I want to activate the camera view so I'm just going back to the beginning hearing the OP object info palette I'm going to select that camera view one more time activate the camera view okay so it's active at our first scene so you'll notice when I'm over this active camera view my cursor changes so if I'm down outside of this well it's actually showing that way as well but basically because this view is active I'm getting these circling arrows here this is the walkthrough tool so if you click and drag the view of your camera is going to change and the animation path white should remember the focus of the camera so let's say we're stepping off the boat and we're just taking a glimpse of the village over here taking a look there see if there any bad guys if they're on the roof you know again double-oh-seven coming into this village here just scoping out the roof okay so for that first that first scene or for the first image we want to be looking in that direction so we've done that with the cursor pretty simply and what we want to do is go to the next keyframe so we can Vance the keyframe with the time slider so let's say at this point we want to actually look over toward the archway we're looking to make sure there no there's no snipers up on this roof up here alright and then we can advance the time it looks like a deactivated the camera view at that point go further the nice thing about this as you scrub through the timeline is you actually seeing the camera move along the path in the plan as well so maybe this active camera view isn't working out so well for you there is another option in Vectorworks and that is to do multi view panel so multi-view panes is an option way up there on your menu bar if you click on that then you can get multi-pane environment in Vectorworks which means we can close this active camera view here and we have other multiple views that we can follow along here in a split screen environment so you close some of these views if you want to you can also see things in you know in just elevation if you need to or in plan in different panes I much prefer the having the main view like this I can look in top plan see where we are okay top plan and then open camera view a new pane I just prefer this this workflow a little bit more just showing you that you have that other option and you can do active camera views in those other panes so getting back to what we were doing we're fine-tuning the position of our cameras we can scrub forward we see the camera moving about in that environment and at this point it turns and looks up toward the archway if we want to change that view and look toward where we're going which might be helpful we can do that and you'll notice that the camera actually moves your field of view moves down here in the in the drawing area as well so we'll go to the next the next spot on the timeline or the keyframe looks like a loss my active view activate camera view one more time scrubbing forward on the timeline you'll notice in the plan our field of view is moving but so is our view here in the custom view we have well at this point it just feels like the camera is kind of just trailing off to the left so I want to pick up the view here and look more toward this alleyway which we're about to walk through we'll notice the camera again updates over there and we'll advance the camera looks like we've lost the active camera view again so we just click on activate camera view advanced a little bit more and I'm just going to go ahead and go to the final step here which is as it flies around the corner and turn we're going to look up at that balcony as the final as a final shot so I know there is one point where it does look up the balcony we're gonna look in this final shot here he's just checking for snipers up on the on the balcony there and we're gonna look out to the further one in the distance and there we go we've moved all of our cameras and I want to do is is just to play the play the view back so I can click on the play button and we'll notice the adjustments we made to the camera as we go through the scene you so all of those saved to the animation path in real-time it didn't save to your document unless you hit command s or control s and save your project so one more thing I'm actually gonna save that at the moment because I'm gonna try and export in real time so let's do that I'm gonna do the bad thing of saving it just to my desktop now I'm very organized but for this moment I just want to make sure I have something to come back to if this crashes so we've created this animation path and in the last few minutes I definitely want to talk about how to get this short animation out of Vectorworks obviously we can tweak this a lot more we can go through different environments we can have a much more robust pathway we can fine tune the cameras quite a bit we can change our render settings etc you know there's really an unlimited number of capabilities in this tool that the team that Vectorworks has created but what I want to do is go all the way down to the very bottom of the object info pallet with the with the camera path selected it looks like the animation path I keep calling a camera path make sure the animation path is selected scroll all the way down to the bottom of the object info pallet and let's look at the create movie dialogue in create movie if you haven't already you have the ability to increase the duration of your feature this may be helpful if you know you're just trying to get a concept kind of hashed out in the drawing area there in vector works really quickly maybe the duration in your video is 5 to 15 seconds and you can just kind of confirm okay all these views are great but at export you can increase this to whatever you desire you can make it a full you know 30 minute feature of just kind of strolling through this town if you want to you can do that right here and number of seconds you can edit that I'm not going to edit that for this particular export because well we're trying to do it live and I don't want to crash the computer it'll probably export fine but I'm just going to take that risk at the moment next thing that we have an option for is the frames per second this is really helpful if you're you know if you're working on film four frames a second is enough if you really wanting to get just a butter smooth rendering out there for your portfolio on YouTube or and many of the other media sites you're really just trying to show off your your your work in your portfolio as you should you can increase this to 60 frames a second and you get that really sweet 60fps they're on YouTube Vimeo whatever you prefer next we have the ability to change our render style I'm gonna leave mine on opengl that's open graphics library it is the lightest render setting you can actually utilize in Vectorworks to apply surfaces and it is what we were previewing the walkthrough with you can assign a quality level now this is the quality of the rendering so I'm gonna leave this at low just to have the best the quickest export I can't say the best it's gonna look kind of muddy at the resolution we have the opportunity to output to our local computer which is our hard drive but if you are a Vectorworks service select member which is available through no veg if you're subscribed to Vectorworks service select you can actually use their cloud to render these movies as well so if you don't want to tie up your workstation you go straight to the cloud with it so one last thing oh you do have the the ability to limit the time range and maybe this is like an actual two hour walk through the village and a tour and whatever it be let's all use our imagination at the moment you can also limit that duration you say okay well the first milestone or the first 10 minutes of that video is all I want to export right now so that's when you would limit the duration here I'm gonna go for the full duration since it's just a 15 second video and the last thing I want to set up is the frame size well I am setting mine to actually a relatively low frame size relatively I'm going to do a 720p but as you notice here 4k is possible with this walkthrough and it looks better when you actually render it at a higher levels just keep in mind every frame that you're rendering Vectorworks has to render that so it may take a little bit of time so I'm gonna click on this save movie button right here and that's going to give us probably a few minutes and that would give us an opportunity to see if there's any reflections questions comments anything that has happened while I've been talking not so thanks Jacob yes there's a question from Federico is it positive so for the rent for rendering the animations you were in the rendering of the animations is asking if it's possible to create a path with the walk through to will game or mode and if it's possible to use the end scape or lumen that means so I'm not aware of the plug-in so I'll answer that immediately haven't been using those plugins with this particular tool so that's remains to be discovered I like that question though and I can imagine that some of those renders may look really impressive if they could work with this with this animation tool so we'll have to get back to you on that I think that's something worth exploring maybe in a future webinar real soon so let me know Barbara we'll see about scheduling that yeah yeah and then the first part of that question was is there a way to use the walkthrough tool to create the pathway and I believe what what you're referring to there is okay so you just watched while I was answering that question you watched the export sequence and that was in 720p so that didn't take too long and we have a really muddy video to show you here in a second but I'm gonna go ahead and close this this extra camera view here and after the export your your drawing area your main view will actually be the the final view of that export because it kind of takes Vectorworks all of its brains to or its coding to make that same work and it's kind of rendering it there in your drawing area so we go to his back to back to our top plan and we'll see our pathway the question was given the walkthrough tool so if you go to visualization tool set and select walkthrough the question was would you be able to animate a video through this tool that I don't believe is is the case the way this walkthrough tool works is well there's a gamer mode up here let me go ahead and get down to an eye level here so I'm going to go back to my orbit tool and we'll just navigate down to eye level of the of the model at the moment and all and I'll show you what the walkthrough tool looks like we're gonna switch that to OpenGL as well to get a better appreciation for what we're looking at so this tool the cursor that we're seeing there is actually the same icon the same cursor icon as in the animation path so because you're technically using the walkthrough tool in that frame to adjust the camera view but I have not seen where to connect the walkthrough tool to actually trace a path that I'm walking that was the question I think that's a really interesting thing is almost like a breadcrumb trail as you walk through the model that would be kind of curious there's other ways to make that happen in Vectorworks as far as like exporting you know webview model so that your clients or yourself can walk through it in real time but I don't believe there's a way to kind of trace your steps what I'm showing you now is the mode that was mentioned is the gamer mode so if you click on the little gamepad there so if you are feeling like you're just tired of all your other video games and you want to just play the Vectorworks video game you can do that so what that does is allow me to use my keyboard controls to just kind of mosey around this as if it were a video game environment inside a wall there and if I want to look around I can just click and drag that will change my view but that doesn't create an animation path unfortunately all right and here's another interesting question is there any way to change the Z height of the camera as he moves along the path for example if you're walking up a flight of stairs so the great thing about the camera the animation path tool is it is supposed to respect risers and changes in site models so if you happen to be an owner of Vectorworks designer which is basically the full meal deal available at Nova CH as well but that basically is so some of you may be working with Vectorworks architect some of you may be working back to work spotlight some of you may be working in factor works landmark well architect and landmark include a tool called the site site model tool and so you can make a digital terrain model and in your walk through path as opposed to obey those pathways it's also supposed to obey risers stair staircases and that kind of thing I haven't had a chance to display that in today's video but if you are on the call and you're watching this video in the future be sure to sign in to the study guide and some of these follow-up questions that really deserve some exploration we're gonna attend some information to that so we're not just gonna leave you hanging we're actually gonna follow up and figure that out for you so we're going to include I'll tell you right now we're gonna we're going to throw some risers in there I've actually got a site model if we have a few seconds so I'll open that and we'll look at what it means to animate through a site model but unfortunately I can't demo it this project-based real time at the moment well that's that's that's a great bonus that you're throwing in Thank You Jacob and so we have another question how did you get your polyline to be actually in the correct plane and Jacque saying my polyline is underneath the model okay so yeah what remind me to play the video through of the site before we leave today but I definitely want to get to this did we we lost Vectorworks okay it happens when you're exporting videos and 3d models and we're doing our best with all the hardware we have at the moment so I exported a fly through of let's see where is it here I'd created ah I'm gonna go I'm gonna go to the screen recording for the moment just to make sure that we play this through for y'all I went into the same 3d warehouse and grabbed a hillside view a 3d view that someone had created and you'll see kind of stepping through this here with the Vectorworks designer architect or landmark you have the ability to create a site model and if you take a mesh object from vector works are from Sketchup 3d warehouse you can convert those 3d Poly's or you convert the mesh into a 3d poly and then you convert the 3d poly into a into a site model so a digital terrain model otherwise and that gives you the ability to well there's a little village that I created but what I want to show you is I created a digital terrain model and did an animation path through that but it didn't recognize the surfaces in all points that the the resolution was not high enough to take into account the resolution of the terrain model but I'm showing you here that it actually did work so I drew that path and it started out at the top of the peak and then it kind of swooped down into the valleys but where the terrain model was a bit jagged it kind of just went through the ground so there's some resolution there that we need to resolve I'm so I know that was a long-winded kind of response but as you may notice there in upper right hand corner and we can see the terrain as we navigate through and then we fly through a few hilltops so that's where I cancelled it and decided okay I need to go with more resolution here but there's a proof of concept for you did I accurately answer the last question that honey Hill so let's let's see let's see if there's I think well let us know and can you remove the roller-coaster quality of the movement andrew is asking right so that's a good question we had our other file crash on us but what I want to show you if we can open one with a pathway here I know what you're talking about that the camera did seem to dip and dive quite a bit and so there was a question about changing the the view height of the camera so I reopened a project from previous to the webinar because I know some of this stuff is setup and hopefully we don't crash while we're capturing here at the moment but if we have the animation path selected there is actually a there's a camera height than Ischl II when you first create it and you can assign that but once it's become like a free fly camera you can't edit that you would have to go into a orthogonal view and then move each one of these points on the on the nerves which is effectively what the camera path is it's a NURBS curve so if I double click on that animation path I keep using camera path and animation path synonymously today what we want to look at is the mode bar up here at the top then move vertex is the first mode we want to have selected and then we want to select the z-axis constrain mode so that constrains the movement of a certain point on our path to just the vertical direction another thing I'm going to do is temporarily disable snapping so you may know that shortcut and if I hold shift it'll kind of lock to that z coordinate for some reason the the tool wasn't doing that so the the path has moved at that point in the z direction so this is kind of inverse of what you requested you said is there a way to remove the roller-coaster out of that I think it's to start without a rollercoaster which is just the basic polyline so if I can demonstrate that really quickly I think we can make that we can't I bow on that like a little village here little world I'm creating happy y'all came to join me today in this little village but we're gonna draw this polyline I'm gonna go through the water and we're just gonna come to it real simple like okay so at this point this is a brand-new polyline I can change the the Z height of this polyline at the moment that's really not going to do a lot for our animation path so here's a recap for some of y'all that may have been joining the call late or are just stepping back to it we go to model create animation create walk through path from selection we've created a simple walk through path and then this is where we can assign that camera height so we can adjust this you know I'm just over six foots and Mike might consider where the camera hype is are you looking for eye level and for home in the scene right so maybe it's a child and that eye level is really low and maybe it's an adult and it's closer you know between five and six feet depending on who you're speaking of so that is where you can assign that camera height now if you're looking to get a consistent camera height but also get the smoothness I'm going to escape out of this real quick escape alright back to the selection tool and I know I'm running over just a moment so thanks everyone for hanging on back to the polyline tool number five on your keyboard up here in the modes you can actually select how you'd prefer to draw your path so I'm going to use the Bezier vertex mode and that means that you have a lot more fluid control over the camera now I'm not worrying about buildings at the moment but if created this polyline with those desi a and now one more time bird recap our second recap third time we covered this model create animation create walkthrough path from selection and now that walkthrough path is nice and smooth and I can control that camera hide so let's say the camera hype is at 15 feet we're gonna do a drone shot of that and then I want to go down here and say open camera view in a new pane so this is nice we see a little bit of terrain back there we're obviously at a higher view point I've created a path with a Bezier spline through the polyline tool and then now we can play through that let's see how well that plays in real time really quick going through a lot of walls probably would have crash my drone at this point but there's a good for instance for you I can extend that time and then I will give back to you wait now yet okay just opened another view pain but now that it's set at 50 seconds to activate the camera view that's a bit tricky activate cam real now play set it to 50 seconds okay so it's gonna go a lot slower now so now I will turn that time back to you any more questions yes Jacob yeah I assigned them to you actually so you can read them along with me so what about incline and incline plane an inclined plane yeah I think that you would need to just create a new working plane at the angle that you desire and then you could draw that polyline on that working plane I think that would be the quickest way to accomplish that okay now it may need to be he it may want to convert it back to a camera height I haven't I haven't tested that circumstance but I'm really curious about about testing that and if you are or you have a moment either any of you that are watching this take a stab at it see see what kind of effects you can get if you do have an object or working playing at an angle and you're needing to manipulate that camera path object I imagine you can end up you know moving those points and snapping to that plane after you've created the animation path so that may be another way to constrain that I hope that helps cool cool and I don't know if you're able to open your question tab everybody may see it I'm not sure what I'm sharing let's see get there otherwise I'll read Jack follow-up about the polyline is saying that when he first drew the polyline it in level Z height and you can move to a different view like writer viewer so but he wanted to draw on the correct plane that's what he meant oh I understand okay yeah I don't know if you're you would either need to know the elevation of that plane or if it's a digital terrain model the animation path will obey the change in that Z direction or you would have to just manipulate it manually in post but if you're drawing a camera path and it's not appearing on your model what you may want to double check on is just to see that all of your elevations of your design layers are accurately set they don't necessarily need to be set to zero but just make sure that the model that you've imported isn't sailing off at like 120 feet off your zero or something like that so that might help your circumstance cool I hope this is a full jack let us know and that was uh yeah is thanking you and appreciate your dedication yeah that's it that was the last question that's fantastic if anybody else is sitting on some questions maybe you just didn't have quite enough time to compose what that very detailed question was just like I mentioned before we've got a study guide available it will be available very shortly probably within 24 hours after we've you know uploaded this video to no veg I know it'll be available there but we've provided a study guide and you can easily get to that by just going to tangibly dot-com and clicking on the study guides link in the header there and pretty easy and roll free today and then we'll keep you posted as that content comes available that's great that's great Jacob thank you so much great and perfect content for a quarantine day I wanna make it relevant yeah indeed I'm gonna switch this screen to remind everybody that we have an ongoing promo so prospects upgrade there is an existing VSS customer can get back to works at 30% off this is pretty huge it's only for the month of April so you know snooze you lose and I also want to show you the page first of all thank you for attending I want to show you again the page where you can see tangibly the training packets which will be updated very soon and you know you can find Vectorworks and watch calm the entire catalogue and I also want to remind you that this session has been recorded in which you can watch it again on our YouTube channel just search for no vege and you know keep learning keep making this quarantine you know meaningful and more of an opportunity than hindrance thank you so much Jacob for today session it was a lot of fun well thank you Barbara for the opportunity and I want to thank everybody else for showing up today because you all make this possible so keep learning out there and and stay inspired and if you've got some challenges in modeling and working with Vectorworks let us know that's that's why we're here yeah he's the man okay bye bye everybody of a great rest of the day bye enjoy a thank you

Channel: Novedge

Views: 3,935

Keywords: Novedge Webinar, Vectorworks, Vectorworks Architect, Vectorworks Landmark, Vectorworks Spotlight, CAD, BIM, 3DModelling, 3D design, Animation, 3D Rendering, Archviz

Id: S9Sph7OJH9Q

Length: 67min 24sec (4044 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 08 2020