6 Steps to Create a Construction Animation in Twinmotion 2019

Twinmotion 2019 introduced more than 90 construction items. With the Phasing Tool, you’ll be able to easily create an animation recording every step of your architectural project from construction to final delivery. In this article, we’ll break down the workflow and show you how to create a construction animation in Twinmotion 2019 in 6 steps, like the one below.

Some “must-know” steps about model preparation, import and material application are previously mentioned in “8 Steps to Create This Interior Scene in Twinmotion 2019”. Make sure to check them out, too.

Step 1-6: Import

Revit sample project
Import via direct synchro
Import the context model

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The project for this animation is a Revit sample project. Using the Twinmotion Dynamic Link for Revit, we synchronized the model from Revit in Twinmotion 2019 in 1 click. Apart from importing geometries during the synchronization, Revit’s materials, characters, vegetation and vehicles are automatically replaced by Twinmotion native items in the library.

Twinmotion is compatible with almost every 3D modeler on the market. You can either use the Dynamic Link for Revit and ARCHICAD or import in one of the formats that Twinmotion supports natively: FBX, SKP, C4D and OBJ.

Once inside Twinmotion, we prepared the context of the project by importing separately a context model from Evermotion in FBX format.

Step 2-6: Add materials

Construction animation in Twinmotion add material

Dressing up the building by quickly dragging and dropping some materials to each face. Twinmotion has 634 PBR materials in the library affected by the entire eco-system in the software. If you don’t find what you’re looking for in the list, create a PBR material by yourself and save it in the User Library for future use.

Step 3-6: Set up the environment

Construction animation in Twinmotion set up environment

Nothing brings life to an architectural project like vegetation and animation. Using the vehicle path in Urban > Path > Vehicle path, we added two lanes of traffic in 2 clicks. Then, with the vegetation brush in Nature > Vegetation, we surrounded the building with trees in 1 click.

Now, you’re ready to go!

Step 4-6: Create phases

Creating phases is the key to a construction animation. The phasing tool in Twinmotion uses a layer system like in Photoshop. By hiding elements of your project in the Scene Manager, you can create different scenes displaying only the unhidden items.

In the above example, we first selected the vegetation filter in the Scene Manager and hid all the vegetation in the scene, and created Phase 01. We then selected the railings and some interior components and hid them to create Phase 02.

Taking the scene created in step 3 as the final scene, we gradually hid objects in the Scene Manager and created multiple phases showing different construction stages.

Step 5-6: Place construction objects

Here, we need to explain some points about the phasing tool first:

The checkbox: when adding a new object to the scene, the object will only be visible in the “Checked” phases. In other phases, the object will be hidden.
The refresh button updates the phase when the status of the components (visible/invisible) has been modified.
Right-click on a phase, and you’ll be able to rename it, move the phase up/down, delete or refresh.

To add construction objects, the checkbox is quite useful. Check the phases where you’d like to place some objects and start to dress up each of these construction stages. We started by unchecking the first 4 phases in order to add the concrete pipes and scaffolding only in phases 04 and 05. We then unchecked phase 05 to add some objects only visible in phase 04 and so on.

Step 6-6: Create a clip with phases

Create a clip

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Now, it’s time to make a video.

First, click on the “+” button to create the starting point of the clip. Then, move the camera to choose another point of view and click the second “+” button to add a keyframe. By doing so, Twinmotion will automatically calculate an animation between the starting point and the second keyframe. Continue to create as many keyframes as the number of phases you have.

Click the “more” button under each keyframe and choose the corresponding phase for each keyframe in Camera settings > Phase.

Here is what we got.

Using the same method, you can easily create the construction animation we’ve seen at the beginning of the article.

To get the accelerating effect, we first rendered a 1-minute video in Twinmotion and compressed it to 10 seconds using Sony Vegas video edit software.

Now, it’s your turn to try! Download a Twinmotion 2019 fully functional trial version.

Share your work with us at Twinmotion Facebook user group or at twinmotion-gallery@abvent.com