Wednesday 2 December 2009

Walking Around a Garden Design

Using 3D Animation in Vectorworks Landmark
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A short while ago, I blogged about Tamsin Slatter's book "Residential Garden Design with Vectorworks Landmark". With the help of this I've now mastered some of the skills of using Vectorworks to develop 3D representations of a garden design, and I've explored further into this, including the animated "movie" facility. So here's a short sequence which allows a client to "walk around" the design and see how it suits them.
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At this stage it may not be the most impressive artwork, especially the robotic-looking human figures, but even they help to give the animation a sense of scale - and my clients get a much better feel for the design than could ever be achieved from a 2D plan or sketch view.
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The next 2 clips show an animation of the sun sweeping around the garden so that the shadow effects of the house, structures and planting can be explored. The animation is set for the summer solstice (June 21st), but could be changed to explore how the light & shade work at other times of the year.
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For the "techies":
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My walk around animation is a "move along path" camera using 20 normal perspective views, rendered using "final quality Renderworks". I specified it at 10 Quicktime fps, so there's around 270 frames in the sequence. On my HP laptop (Windows Vista, Core-2 Duo T5800 2.0Ghz processor, 3GB RAM) it takes not far short of 2 hours to generate! The animation seems a bit "hurried" and plays much better at 1/2 speed in Quicktime, so I should probably slow it to "time scale 0.5" when I generate it - next time I've got 3 or 4 hours of idle time on my machine!!! The other 2 clips are "solar animations" using a high elevation orthogonol view and a normal perspective view. These take about 40 minutes to generate at 10 fps.

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