Q on Animating Object construction

DigitalSprocket

I am working on a project where I've made an object in Maya that needs to "build out".  I found some really great reference by Guillaume Kurkdjian where each part is animated from nothing to its final state (easier to see than describe: Jukebox, Uber, House Construction, Hotel. As you can see some parts expand out from nothing, some extrude into place and others seem to have some kind clipping mask. I am really racking my brain on how I would approach this. Am I looking at blend shapes, deformers, something else? Thoughts?

Thank you

throttlekitty

Anything goes! And there's a lot of anything going on here! Planning is key, try to break down what you want to do to simpler tasks. In Maya, you can set keyframes on nearly anything, to make it go. Let's grow a simple house as a quickie:

Starting with a plane with good subdivisions for the windows later, you can extrude the faces straight up. Set keyframes on the Thickness value for 0 and frame 1, and say 50 at frame 50. Set some divisions that you can use for the windows, no need to key that value. Now you have geometry for the windows you can extrude from. Again, setting the thickness keyframes maybe from 0 to -5 at keyframes 30 and 50. You could do similar things with extruding a roof, or have the roof as a separate object. That hotel example looks like it starts with visibility off and a tiny bit smaller, grows and translates up and into that cute rest-bounce thing.

Again, planning is important, and you'll be working back and forth on your timeline. Consider non-uniform scaling to make things pop out of midair. Blendshapes could work just as well, but I think sticking with keying extrudes and transforms would be much easier.

I'm not sure how to best do that clipping mask. Maybe a boolean from either a cube or a boundary of planes? You can boolean a poly object and a group node that contains multiple objects, plus you get that nifty material transfer like the street demo.

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DigitalSprocket

Man, you guys are awesome!  I posted on two other sites and got a reply "Yeah, do all of that" and very little traffic. Thank you for the helpful replies. This makes a bunch more sense. I may make some controls to help organize each section too.

A question for you @TeriyakiStyle, I wonder if will there be any rendering/shadow issues where the crease of the window meets the building when flat.

I'll have to give this a try when the project changes gears back.

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DigitalSprocket

TeriyakiStyle said:

It would depend on a lot of variables but generally flat will render flat - especially in a stylized setup shown in the examples.  You can also do model swaps hide models between frames.  Cinema 4d has a lot of built in stuff for this - maya has some new motion graphics tools but I haven't tried them yet.

All in all it's fun to play with and the result is clean and good looking.

Fantastic! Thank you. I haven't animated in almost 10 years so the animation tricks are buried a bit deep. The model swap will work perfectly, plus I can add that to the controller to make it seamless.