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.