In our experience, it is often the “simple” projects that require more creative pre-planning. How can you make an easy 3D flythrough look exciting when nothing is really having to be animated? In this 3D flythrough animaton we made for NOV, the request was simple: make our customers sit through a minute long video about our product. We don’t want voice over, but we do want it to be informative and, as always, badass.

Challenge accepted.

This story feeds its viewers with swooping 3D camera moves, eye-guiding animated lights, and mouthwatering candy-apple red paint. Half-way through watching this 3D flythrough, you might forget it’s about metal pipes and you might start feeling hungry!

Why having a 3D flythrough animation of your product will make you rich

Even if you have hands-down, objectively THE best, obviously superior product compared to your competitors – you’re barely half way there. Your customers need to see it. They need to instantly understand it and want it. You need to stop them from walking past your booth at a tradeshow or stop them from scrolling past your post on Linkedin. It needs strong visual storytelling. Regardless of your product, customers are expecting to see an efficient, well-made video to make a purchasing decision.

If it’s not in your budget or there’s not enough time to do a full explainer or how-it-works video of your product, that’s okay! Making a 3D flythrough animation is an option that can be equally eye-catching, informative, and necessary. Showing what your product looks like in an interesting, beautiful way like a 3D flythrough helps customers visualize the product in their space and how it will solve their problems. That’s one customer you didn’t have before.

Our 3D flythrough recipe

Step 1 – Script and Audio

The beauty of this animation is that the entire story was told without a narrator. This not only saves money on copywriting services and hiring professional voice talent, but also makes for a more efficient story that can be told to a wider audience. Some people don’t or can’t listen to the audio, like when scrolling through social media or when at a noisy trade show. In this case, it was important to the client to hit all of the key selling points even if the person watching couldn’t hear the video at all. Despite this, a script is still an important building block of the animation to help plan the flow of the story.

Step 2 – Storyboard

This frac flowback animation was all about showing each product in the system in an eye-catching way. We create a storyboard to help us determine what goes where, composition, and what the on-screen text should say. This helps us (and let’s be real, sometimes the client too) visualize how the equipment is laid out in practice. This is the step that helps us solve problems with the sequence and design so as to ensure an understandable and efficient story.

Step 2 – Styleframe

A styleframe is what we call a single frame of the animation that is fully rendered and composited. It’s the closest glimpse of what the final animation will look like weeks before we finish it. It’s kind of like cheating, but allows the client to make big changes to the look and feel while the project is still young. This is an especially helpful phase of the project for clients who don’t know what an animatic is (see next step) and think we’re bait-and-switching them with crappy graphics. Don’t worry, it will move like step 4 but look like step 3!

Step 4 – Animatic

4 steps deep and we’re just now making it move! When done right, the setup takes a long time and it’s all downhill from there. This is where execute the plan: tell your story and make your product look awesome! Let me say what you’re all thinking: This does not look very awesome. You’re totally right, not yet! Making this ugly early 90’s looking draft render is just the first step! Giving our clients the opportunity to make big adjustments in this round saves them time and money before it becomes more difficult to change later.

Step 5 – Rendering and Compositing

After the animatic is approved, we click the render button and the video is done. Just kidding, this is a highly time consuming and technical process where art meets science meets religion. Each second of animation is just 24 still frames flashed quickly in sequence. We take all those little render babies and layer them together in what’s called a “composite” or “comp”, it’s like fancy photoshop. Once rendered and comped, even metal pipes can look tasty enough to eat!

Step 6 – Send it to the bank

Play this baby at your trade show and get ready to lose some personal space and see the insides of a lot of people’s gaping mouths. This particular piece meant the sales engineer could spend his days engineering new products instead of sitting on a plane on the way to meet yet another oil and gas tycoon for the day on-location. It meant not exposing the entire company to Covid. It meant the sales calls and the entire sales cycle could be drastically reduced because of a more efficient, visual presentation. Don’t just take our word for it, here it is straight from the client!