One of the facts that most worries any visualizer before start an architectural animation it’s concentrated in one fear:

“Can I reach to the deadline with the work finished?”

It’s a reasonable fear because it’s based on a calculation that you have to do several weeks before with many facts involved that can make fail the precision of the date.

In this post, we give you some tricks to get it.

The commission

We thought that in relation to this promotion, our work was finished.

We knew that sales were going well. However, the client surprised us: “I want an animation of the set, both exterior and interior”. We have already commented the other day the reasons that prompted him in making that decision.

We were very excited. However, soon difficulties began.

The first one was that the commission did not come alone; for the same date…

We had to make another animation project!

Uff, it certainly was another very good news, but suddenly the delivery time was halved by doubling the work to be performed. The order came in mid-July and both animations should be finished on September 15. Two months for two animations and amid summer of three people.

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Dates and times for an architectural animation

We knew that the approach was crazy but at the same time, it seemed a great opportunity.

As always, we proposed the timeline for an architectural animation in reverse chronological order. The video, initially, was raised with a duration of three minutes. Therefore:

3 min x 60 sec = 180 seconds,

every second needs 25 frames => 180 x 25 = 4,500 frames.

Through our experience in similar work, we set the limit calculation of 5 minutes / frame. You can always improve an image but you have to put a limit. Certain parameters can quickly multiply the calculation time of a frame and, consequently, the total.

Therefore 4,500 x 5 min = 22,500 minutes = 375 hours = 16 days.

Our small rendering farm allowed us to reduce those 16 days to 4. Of course, if all went well on the first try.

And that does not happen EVER.

Therefore we had to have at least a week for the rendering process.

There were some frames that took less than five minutes. However, those with numerous light sources or millions of polygons, went to 45 minutes.

interior render living room with artificial lighting

That left us two weeks to model, texture and light up the whole. Remember that besides the exterior, we should visualize the interior of one of the houses. Then we realized it was not possible to deliver the two architectural animations in the arranged date. Thus, all efforts were focused to get Residencial Montecarmelo at the time and the other one … a month later? … No, just 15 days later. This is how it was done.

time lapse scene of swimming pool

Not only that.

The architectural animation video, for various reasons, went from a duration of 3 minutes to a final length of 4 minutes and 20 seconds, almost 50% more!