Creating Long Take Animations with Enscape

Creating beautiful animations in Enscape is fast and easy but rendering separate files requires time consuming editing to stitch everything together. Not any more! These time-saving techniques will allow anyone to quickly and easily create single long take animations that can be previewed live in Enscape.

Sign Up for Enscape Monthly Updates!

What's The Problem?

The project manager needs an interesting animation sequence or eye-candy for meetings and presentations. But you know how time consuming and difficult this can be; subjective subtleties can create viscous rendering cycles and keep you from getting to post production. You want the simplicity of a still image slideshow with the option to animate (think PowerPoint on steroids).

Design keeps changing up until the last possible moment. You don't want to render the animation too soon because you'll just have to do it again when the project has important design changes. But if you wait too late you risk missing an important deadline. Ideally what you need is a predictable and implementable workflow that can accommodate important design changes as late as possible without putting a deadline at risk.

You don't always have time to render. As fast as Enscape is able to render animations it still takes time you don't have and it's another thing you have to remember to do (amid many other stressful deadlines). One hour of rendering time is an eternity of stress when the meeting is forty five minutes away. Rendering becomes especially complicated when there's dozens of separate sequences, at different times of the day and more that need to be rendered individually and then edited together in post production. Fortunately there's a better way!

The Solution: Create A Single Long Take

In most cases it's possible to create a single long take animation in Enscape (if you haven't heard of a long take in film making start over here). Essentially you're creating a single, long camera path rather than a multitude of separate camera paths. The video below illustrates Enscape's ability to transition camera location, orientation, time of day and depth of field as a single long take sequence. Rather than create all of these sequences separately and stitching together in post-production, this video was created as a single long take.

This technique allows you to create interesting videos previewed live during meetings and presentations. You can have the simplicity of a still image slideshow with the option to animate sequences that incorporate time of day, depth of field and appear to cut from location to location.

You can keep up with design changes until the last possible moment. Since the animation is presented live in Preview mode, you're less constrained by tight deadlines. You have the freedom of setting up the long take without the added stress of having to save the result as an animation. When it's time to present the animation, simply load the camera path into the latest design file, press preview and present it live.

If you have to render the animation - at least you can do it as efficiently as possible. Enscape will render a minute of animation in about 5 minutes on my computer. Rather than create separate sequences (with time spend opening and closing separate camera paths for rendering) this technique allows you to render all the sequences together as one long animation. As a result you can begin to draft the final animation in post production with a one (rather than multiple) draft animation as context. Just before the final deadline push, re-render the animation at the higher quality and swap out the result with the previous draft source animation. You can quickly save the final result from your post editing software. Personally, I prefer Camtasia by TechSmith for ease of use, price, speed and quality. What's more? It's available for Windows and OSX.

Steps to Success

1. Creating the cameras. Here's the trick: you'll be creating cameras on top of cameras. This allows you to create transitions without the camera to appearing to move when transitioning depth of field and time of day. The camera won't appear move because both cameras are the exact same position.
2. Saving the Camera Path and opening the XML file in Notepad. This allows you to tweak the timestamps (and more) of each camera to get exacting position, transitions and more. An you'll be able to see all of the cameras in one long list, rather than be limited to one camera at a time in the Enscape editor.
3. That's it. There's no Step 3. Seriously - if I can do this anyone can. :)

Getting Started

If you're not familiar with the Enscape animation tool you might want to back up a bit and get a broader overview. Dan Stine has created a wonderful best practices and getting started guide over here. Dan's article will give you a needed foundation before you jump in the deep end. :)

The following example has eight cameras and two scenes (four cameras for each scene). In each scene, two cameras will be in exactly the same position: at the beginning and end of each scene. The resulting long shot for both scenes will last forty seconds.

You can download and use the Revit / Enscape project created while making this tutorial here (Revit 2020). If you don't have Revit 2020, use the Revit Sample Project. The process is the same - just select two areas in the project that you'd like to highlight as individual scenes.

To begin, we have to adjust some Settings in Enscape. Open the Enscape Settings menu and change the Depth of Field to 20% and uncheck Auto Focus. Note that the Depth of Field is a global setting - you can increase or decrease this value for the entire animation sequence.

Launch Enscape and toggle on the Video Editor (or press the K key). Navigate to the first location as shown below. Press the +Add Keyframe button (or press the K key again) to add a keyframe. The first keyframe is shown at the beginning of the Timeline as a little triangle.

Navigate to the next camera position as shown below. Select +Add Keyframe. The second keyframe is shown at the end of the Timeline. You have two keyframes.

Click on the first triangle on the left side of the Timeline to take you to back to the first keyframe. You'll be "inside" the camera in first person mode. This also opens the Keyframe Editor and indicates you're editing Keyframe 1/2 (one of two).

The Keyframe Editor allows to edit the camera in a number of ways (from left to right in the image below):

• Time of Day: Changes the time of day for the camera (using 24 hr time).
• Timestamp: Determines the length of time taken to move from the previous keyframe to the present keyframe. Since this is the first camera on the timeline the timestamp option is greyed out.
• Depth of Field: Sets the Focal Point of the camera. As you adjust the Depth of Field you'll notice a white line moving across the scene toward or away from the camera indicating the Focal Point.
• Insert: Allows you to place another camera from the present location. During this tutorial we'll insert a new camera at the present location and then not move the camera.
• Apply: Saves the changes. Don't forget to use the Apply button or you'll lose your changes.
• Delete: Removes the camera from the Timeline.
• Back: Leaves the Keyframe Editor and returns to the Video Editor and Timeline.

Change the Depth of Field - Focal Point to 0.001 for first keyframe. The entire scene will be out of focus as shown in the image below. Be sure to select Apply after the Depth of Field change to save the change.

Now we're going to create a new camera at the very same position as the first camera. Press Insert and then Confirm.

Now change the Timestamp to 5 seconds and edit the Depth of Field to bring the scene into focus as shown below. Select Apply to save changes. As a result the camera will not move but the scene will come into focus over 5 seconds.

To the right of the Keyframe Editor panel (at the top of the editor) are two small triangles that allow you to advance forward and backward to each keyframe on the Timeline. Select the triangle on the right to advance to Keyframe 3/3.

As seen in the image below, change the Time of Day to 05:00 (5am) and change the Depth of Field so the neon sign is in focus and the foreground is out of focus. Don't forget to select Apply.

From this same camera location select Insert and Confirm to place another camera. Reduce the Depth of Field to the lowest value of 0.001. Select Apply. You've now placed the first four cameras and completed the first scene.

Note: Don't worry about the exact Time of Day or Timestamp settings. It's impossible to get these values exactly right with the present UI. Instead, we'll eventually save the Camera Path and edit the resulting XML file.

Now select Back to return to the Video Editor and Timeline. If you want to preview your work so far, press the P key to preview the animation path from the beginning of the timeline.

As shown below (by the little triangles on the Timeline) there are four keyframes. The first four cameras on the timeline should be as follows (remembering that we'll adjust the exact Time of Day and Timestamp values via XML file). If you need to review the Timestamp of the cameras simply double on the first camera and use the scrollwheel to adjust the Timestamp. Don't forget to select Apply before jumping to the next keyframe.

• Camera 0: 0 seconds
• Camera 1: 5 seconds mark
• Camera 2: 25 seconds mark
• Camera 3: 30 seconds mark

Now let's place the next four cameras. Navigate to the location shown below and select +Add Keyframe. Then click on the triangle to the farthest right on the Timeline to enter the camera and open the Keyframe Editor. You'll be inside of camera 5/5. Change the Time of Day to 15:00 (3pm). Reduce the Depth of Field to the lowest value of 0.001. Select Confirm and Apply. Don't worry about the timestamp for now. We'll edit that later.

Insert another camera (6/6) at the same location. Increase the Depth of Field to bring the scene into focus as shown below. Select Confirm and Apply.

Select Insert to place another camera (7/7) and move to the location shown below. Change the Time of Day to 06:00. Increase the Depth of Field to bring the scene into focus as shown below. Select Confirm and Apply.

Select Insert to place another camera (8/8) at the same location. Decrease the Depth of Field to the lowest value of 0.001 and the scene will be out focus as shown below. Select Confirm and Apply.

Now that all eight cameras have been placed, let's save the camera path. Return to Revit and select Camera Path>Save Path from the Enscape tab. Save the XML file to your Desktop.

Navigate to the XML file and right-click to open it with Notepad. We will enter exact values (highlighted below) for the hour and the timestampSeconds values, so as the camera moves the time of day will appear to change as well. In the example below, the time of day is changing in a way that will be very noticable: 10 hours in 10 seconds for example, between Keyframe order 1 and 2. In actual practice, this might be too severe. More subtle shifts in time of day can be very pleasing during animations. Changing the time of day for an hour or so over 10 seconds is not distracting and yet creates a pleasing sense of time passing.

Now you can the trick of how we make the camera appear to jump to a new scene: simply decrease the timestampSeconds value to 1/100th of a second between two keyframes. This is illustrated in the image below by Keyframe order values 3 and 4. Keyframe 3 starts at 20 seconds and ends at keyframe four at 20.01 seconds. As a result, the camera jumps from one position to the next faster than you can see it happen. Save the changes and close Notepad.

Return to Revit and select Camera Path>Load Path from the Enscape tab.

Return to Enscape and look at the Timeline in the Video Editor. It appears there are only seven cameras on the timeline. But remember - there are actually eight cameras. Why is this? Remember that cameras 4/8 and 5/8 are only 1/100th of a second apart. These two keyframes practically overlap and the keyframes appear to be the same triangle on the timeline.

Now you can preview the entire 40 second long shot camera path live using the Preview function. Press the Preview button (or press the P key).

Hint: if you are "inside" a camera in first person mode and press the P key, the preview will start to play from that camera.

Once you are satisfied with the Preview you can select Render Video from the Enscape tab (the rendered video is shown below). But you don't have to render the video. Instead, save the camera path into your project folder and when needed, start Enscape, load the camera path and preview the video live.

This about it: there's no reason why you can't create a long take that is 10 minutes long or even longer! Rendering a 10 minute animation would take Enscape about an hour. But Enscape will happily preview the entire camera path live, saving hours of rendering and re-rendering time with the added benefit of including every design change in the live animation preview. You can quickly and easily include important design highlights in your camera path without being stressed from having to re-render the animation to present a final result. :)

Bonus Tip / Trick

Editing the XML file of the animation path is also a great way to introduce new cameras into an existing animation path. Simply create a new camera path and save it. Then open the new XML file and copy the new camera path. Then open the existing long take camera path and paste the new camera path into the existing XML file camera path. Make sure to update the subsequent Keyframe order and Timestamp seconds values. Save the XML file and close Notepad. Load the camera path back into Enscape. The new camera path is included into the existing camera path.

Once again, if you'd like to download and use the Revit / Enscape project created while making this tutorial they're over here (Revit 2020).

I sincerely hope this tips and tricks article helps you get the most your of Revit and Enscape. If you have any questions just send me a message on Linkedin or in the comments field below. Enjoy! :)

______________

ReadThomas?would love to help you succeed with?Enscape! Simply email us for a brief demo for you and your team. If you purchase online, please let the?Enscape?team know that you heard about Enscape from Read Thomas. We're looking forward to providing you with complimentary training, implementation and support for Enscape!?www.readthomas.com.