Five Tips and Tricks for Creating Enscape Animations with Revit

A little thinking outside the box goes a long way when using the Enscape animation tool with Autodesk Revit.

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The Enscape animation tool is fast, easy to use and the results are beautiful. But there are a few limitations if you need more sophisticated results. First of all, you need more careful control of the Enscape camera. Second, there's no batch rendering for multiple animation paths. Finally, you need to carefully edit the timestamps between keyframes. If your goal is to create a quick animation that doesn't require post production the out of the box animation tool is probably fine. But if you're trying to get into post production and require more sophisticated results, the following five techniques will increase control and streamline workflow.

Tip #1: Allowing the Camera to Rest.

The Enscape animation immediately begins to move at the start of an animation. But it's often necessary to allow the camera 5 to 10 seconds of rest at the beginning and end of an animation. By allowing the camera to rest you can cross fade to the next sequence without undesirable movement between sequences. This can be accomplished by placing two Enscape keyframe cameras on top of (or very close to) each other and allowing five to ten seconds to laps between keyframes.

Tip #2: Editing the Enscape Camera.

Controlling the Enscape camera from within Enscape doesn't give enough careful control of the cameras location, orientation and pitch. Do you want the camera to move kind of down the middle of a hallway or do you need to make certain the camera is centered exactly in the middle of the hallway with specific angle and elevation? In this case you'll need to control the Enscape camera from Revit. Selecting the Enscape camera in Revit displays feedback with regard to the camera's precise elevation, orientation and pitch. When you set the location of the Enscape camera in Revit, the corresponding Enscape camera in Enscape is set as well as well allowing you to more carefully define keyframe locations.

Tip #3: Creating a Continuous Cut.

The default Enscape animation tool doesn't allow batch rendering of separate animation paths. Even though Enscape renders animations quickly and easily, waiting for one animation to finish in order to manually load and render the next animation is uninteresting and time consuming. Rather than create separate animation paths you can create one continuous animation path that represents the entire video sequence. Creating one continuous cut animation will also allow you (or someone else) to begin to lay out the entire video as soon as possible in post production.

Tip #4: Creating Jump Cuts.

Don't waste valuable time rendering from the end of one animation path to the start of the next animation path. Instead, create a jump cut of 1/100th of a second to immediately jump to the next sequence from the end of the previous sequence. As soon as Enscape is finished rendering one sequence, the camera will will appear to immediately jump to the next animation sequence.

Tip #5: Editing the Camera Path in XML .

The Enscape animation tool doesn't allow careful control of keyframe timing along the animation path. Unfortunately, setting a specific time for one keyframe will often inadvertently change the timing of previous keyframes (even for keyframes with specific time stamps). In order to carefully control the timing of keyframes along an animation path we'll export the entire animation to XML and edit the XML file.

Here's the webinar presenting each of these tips and tricks for getting the most out of using the Enscape animation tool with Revit.

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