Steel Special Effects for Gerdau Fast-Frame

A few months ago we designed a site for Gerdau-​Fast-​Frame explain­ing their process for build­ing steel struc­tures cheaper and faster. We recently went back and spiced up the page that explains the process with a nine-​step inter­ac­tive flash dia­gram. The core of the dia­gram is a vir­tual build­ing that slowly takes shape as the process moves for­ward. This required a few spe­cial effects that Blake and I had never tried before.

On my end, I had to design a fic­tional build­ing from scratch, then design all of its fram­ing and guts in layers so it could be animated in stages and still look real between steps. Luckily, we have tons of con­struc­tion around town so I went on a few field trips to see how build­ings look half way con­structed. The final result took a few late nights and a little scream­ing at the screen to get right. A tip to any design­ers read­ing this: If you ever have to design a vir­tual build­ing, you should know that doing it in two-​point per­spec­tive looks great, but is very difficult to prop­erly render. Especially if you have to render every step of its construction!

For Blake, that challenges all came from animating the build­ing smoothly. I men­tioned above that two-​point per­spec­tive is tough for design­ers … well, its absolute hell for flash animators. You see, flash is basically a bunch of flat shapes moving around. Making those shapes con­tinue to stay in per­spec­tive while moving is quite a challenge. I’m sure Blake could expound with a little more color on that. Luckily its a challenge he was up for and the finished product looks great.

This was a pretty tough job all the way around, but we hung in there and ended up with a really great fin­ished prod­uct. It is a little sad to see a few weeks worth of work animate in about 5 sec­onds though. So for our blog, we’ve pro­vided a few stills images, and a slowed down ver­sion of the movie so you can get a better look at all our work. Think of it as a DVD spe­cial fea­ture for our Fast-​Frame spe­cial effects.