"Property Brothers" animation

Hello everyone, is it possible in rhino to make animations on “property brothers” style? I only see options to move with the camera, not animate objects to start appearing and sliding to the spaces.

Hi Leo -

You’ll need a custom script or an animation plug-in to do that in Rhino.
-wim

Bongo :slight_smile:

@Normand I wonder if there is an other way or free option that I don’t need to pay 500 dolars to do this. I saw that rhino has snapshots in it, but do’nt know if it connects with enscape. Also don’t know if bongo connects with enscape renderer either.

500 dolars is a lot for a blind shot.

It doesn’t - and neither does any other animation package, to my knowledge. If you want animations in Enscape, you’ll have to settle for Enscape’s in-build camera animations. It’s on their wish list (and have been for a while), but I’ve no idea if/when object animation will be available.
-Jakob

PS If you are looking for a program that does animation and price is a factor, it doesn’t get any better than Blender - it’s great and it’s free and the Cycles render (which is what Rhino is using too) is more than decent.

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@Normand snapshots in rhino doesnt connect to enscape? All I need is to slide things into a space and make scenes of it. I need to create tweens between all those scenes with 30 FPS. So it would be a lot of snaps created.. after it I could join them in capcut or something.

Hi @Leo13
Nothing, in terms of animation, connects to Enscape. Not in Rhino or any other program. You can do simple camera animations inside Enscape, but it doesn’t support object animations of any kind - not even made inside Enscape itself.
-Jakob

I need to make scenes of those sliding objects and create tweens between all those scenes with 30 FPS. So it would be a lot of snaps created. Snapshots in rhino could do this? After it I could join them in capcut or something.

D5 Render will let you do “sliding” animations like this, gives you a free trial and is reasonably priced for what you get and is still “approachable” versus something like Unreal Engine or 3ds Max.

As @Normand pointed out though, cost and capability wise, Blender has you covered here… There is A LOT of content like this done in Blender and likely even a template or two floating around on the web that you could adapt with your specific scene elements/geometry.

If you want to go the Rhino route I would recommend using Grasshopper and the “Animate Slider” capability.

Create a single slider from 0.0 to 1.0 that acts as the “start/end” of your animation and then apply a Move transform to each geometry as needed where the vector is your direction, the amplitude is the distance, and that is multiplied by the single slider from 0.0 to 1.0 so 0 will be no movement, and 1 will be the finished transform.

You can get fancier here in Grasshopper by adding in pauses/delays/datadams, special path following, smorph, twist or other weird transformations.

Will it be real-time? Probably not BUT when you right click the slider and choose “Animate…” you can set your FPS in the dialog to (anything? last I did this was 120fps, butter smooth) and your resolution of the frame(s) as well.

You take the folder of images and import it into a video editor to produce a video file such as .mp4 and you have a super slick and smooth animation completely done in Grasshopper/Rhino and the beauty is that it supports any of the Display Modes/Materials as well… So you could even animate lights I guess if so inclined though I’ve never taken it that far.

Anyways, start with a single slider and experiment with moving a box in a direction based on Direction, Distance, and the slider value multiplier, export those frames and then let the potential unfold from there.

Hope that helps @Leo13 !

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reasonably priced if you are from a 1° world country :zipper_mouth_face:.

Thanks for the grasshopper advice, I might be using this. Is this animate slider a plugin? couldn’t find it in grasshopper.

If it can deliver to make a bunch of tween scenes (30FPS) between scenes that consist without the object in a space and after that the scene with the object in the space and tween 30fps from one scene to another I guess it is enough.

you just right click on any slider in grasshopper and you can select Animate...

Well yea I only mean in comparison to other software pricing in my country. I don’t have access to the knowledge of how it compares / is priced regionally and globally.

Mostly just comparing it against Autodesk pricing :sweat_smile:

Right click on the Number Slider component and choose “Animate…”

Example Video of Animate Slider Frame Results:

Here’s a grasshopper example of what I outlined above for you to start with:

Model Space (Starting State):

Model Space (Ending State):

Graph Space:

20250423_Grasshopper_Animated_Object_With_Slider_Animate_Example_01a.gh (14.1 KB)

EDIT:

The point of what I shared is that if you watch the video closely, every piece of geometry can be described in a transformation operation from A to B with the interpolation being time of course.

So can create “fancy waves” animations of objects, sliding, rolling, bouncing, you name it, so long as it can be created with a transform operation.

You can even interpolate between materials/material properties, transparency, etc.

The animation is your oyster

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haha no worries, autodesk is a full rip off, I know! I shouldn’t even have said that about the pricing, although it is high for my reallity.

Besides that, what I am wondering about this grasshopper animation is: how this animation that generate images from grasshopper and send them to a folder, could instead of generating images in .bpm files, generate rhino scenes.

What I need is a bunch of scenes, each frame of the 30fps being a rhino scene. So I can Render each scene in Enscape.

Well others would know better than myself in this regard… I’m not sure how many “Scenes” or NamedViews Rhino can handle in its view table at once. Keeping in mind that at 30fps for a 1.5 minute animation that would be 2,700 scenes/camera views to cycle through.

Rather than create all those named views (which can be done with scripting) I think the more logical approach would be to animate a single viewport and/or camera itself and create a render at each camera and then handle the visibility of your objects/animations accordingly.

Enscape is, unfortunately, probably one of the few rendering programs most unsuited for this task. That being said… You can get hacky with Enscape by setting the scene camera dynamically by editing the .xml file of your camera position if you dig into the files and stuff but again… that’s really “forcing” everything when other programs are just better suited for animation tasks.

So, In summary, is it possible. Yes. Is it straight forward? No, but hopefully someone will come in here and pleasantly surprise us with a great idea to achieve it!

Hi Leo -

You could download the 30-day eval of Bongo to avoid that being a blind shot.

Somewhat relevant - I see that Enscape is a subscription at 515,- EUR (580,- USD) per year…
-wim

Twinmotion has some nice capabilities for rendering and animations, its powered by EpicGames/UnrealEngine so got some ooomph behind it, you can also use for free if your revenue is under $1million dollars a year. There is a direct link plugin which connects Rhino to TM too

how could bongo animation generate scenes? It will animate in enscape how could I in Enscape make the video of it? I think is not possible. What I need is something that generate scenes or named views as 1 frame per second.

And you are right, enscape is already very expensive, so it would be another 500 dolars for an other plugin (bongo)

Hi @Leo13

I looked at the video you posted. I think it might be more composited than created in a single program it looks like the 3d rendering is Twinmotion or D5. Then was composited it in video editing software. The carpet unrolling looks composited on top of the background.

You could try to download daVinci resolve since it’s free for the most part.

In Rhino generate png images at the res and size of your animation. These you can use as backgrounds and when you want to switch scenes.

For objects that move or appear render them with the transparent background object checked and save as png. You could also animate them with a Rhino hack by going to the final position, render than hit undo and render again. Bring these files into DaVinci resolve and add them to your timeline and play with settings and timing.

Make sure you keep a watch on your camera. Don’t move it accidentally and/or save views.

In DaVinci resolve begin overlaying your images and moving them in the timeline to how you want. You could do a lot of what you’re seeing in the video. For instance you can swap out images or have them move up or down over other images.

One last level you could download OBS studio and screen capture the scene changes in Rhino this way you will at least have a capture of all of that movement.

Try Twinmotion or D5 I think they are both free.
Try Ai by uploading images and typing what you want though not free for many things.
RM