Speaker 0 00:00:02 Hello everyone. And welcome to the robot nation podcast. This is the podcast dedicated to advanced manufacturing capital equipment and the robotics and automation industry. We'll be covering trends and topics important to factory automation and robotics. Then we'll interview guests in our series of podcasts. We know that manufacturing is great. It brings all kinds of jobs into your community. And if you're good, you have a job for white. So welcome everyone. My name is Jim Beretta, and I am your host. If you liked this podcast, please rate us wherever you find your podcasts, but more importantly, tell your friends about it, send them an email, tweet us or hashtag robot nation podcast. And if you'd like to get in touch with us, our email address is robot nation
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Speaker 1 00:01:13 Today's edition. I am interviewing bill Chapin yak. Phil is president of three D at a Phil as an engineer, a technologist and entrepreneur. We have been friends we've known each other for over 15 years. We have worked on many projects together. I would say Phil was one of the top industrial animators in North America. He's creative and he creates mind blowing, innovative technical animations. So 3d it's the number three letter D E I T. And welcome to the podcast, Phil. Thanks for having me, Joe, Phil, as I mentioned in our intro, we'd worked together for many years on many projects and thanks for taking the time to be with me today. Uh, on the robot nation podcast, I wanted to ask you a question about how did you get involved in creating what I call photorealistic technical animations? Well, I went to, uh, to college for mechanical engineering and I've always had an interest in computer animation, but I originally thought of going in animation, but required.
Speaker 1 00:02:17 It required a, a bachelor of fine arts to actually get into the animation program that I was interested in. So that scratch that from the list and off I went to mechanical engineering when I was, uh, on my work terms and kind of graduated from the program. I ended up asking a local cab, uh, reseller, uh, if anyone in the areas using the animation software that Hollywood uses for industrial uses. And I linked up with a company and just learned on the job, how to do all this, uh, animation and rendering for marketing. So the company was, uh, in the steel industry and I basically worked on all of their products and, uh, rendered and animated, uh, their product line for their salespeople basically to take around on notebook computers at the time because the equipment was so huge and that was pretty much it and then continued on and, uh, ended up going my own way, uh, with, uh, 3d at about, I'd say eight years ago.
Speaker 0 00:03:31 And what are some of the key advantages of animation
Speaker 1 00:03:35 They used, uh, primarily it's marketing. You know, everyone wants to explain their product or process, uh, somehow, uh, to their prospective clients. And animation is a great tool for that. When some things are difficult to understand or difficult to explain, and visual explanation is kind of the best, best way to do it. Uh, just to explain how things work,
Speaker 0 00:04:01 Video animation allows you to create versions and melt away layers. And we've done this on many projects between you and I, right? So you can still off the show audience, how, how certain elements work or don't work as a marketer. I think it's one of the most compelling parts of what you do.
Speaker 1 00:04:16 Yeah, it's really neat. Like if you compare it to film and video, you have a lot of challenges. If you want to show something internally or show different areas of a product, whereas with the animation we can, we can defy. We can defy that we get the five physics, we can defy visual cues and we can do dynamic cutaways. We can do transparencies and other really cool ways of showing components like exploded views as well. But the cutaway views are really neat because you can just slice, slice a machine in half like butter and you could see the internals.
Speaker 0 00:04:55 What I like about that too, is that if you've got something that is secret sauce and you have an audience that you don't want to show that to, and you have an audience, you can show that to then making different versions is just really, um,
Speaker 1 00:05:08 It's really easy. Yes, you can. You can totally be selective in what you want to show. So if there's some secret black box in your component, in your product, you can hide that visually using graphics.
Speaker 0 00:05:23 So where do your customers see value in technical animations? Like what initial problem are they trying to solve?
Speaker 1 00:05:30 Well, yeah, like I said before, it's just, it's, they're trying to sell something, but I mean, that's the biggest, the biggest thing is, uh, using animation as a sales tool. And part of that selling process is explaining the product and how it works and how it's better than your competition or, you know, things like that. So it's all about understanding and then simple visual communication. So that's what I always look at is no, no clutter. You're, you're just telling a story visually piece by piece, and then you've curated as best you see. And then kind of the perfect part is when you have a viewer that's watching the video kind of has that aha moment and understands the product. And that's when we know we've done a good job.
Speaker 0 00:06:22 How does one get started in creating a technical animation with 3d? Like where do you start? Is it, do you have a line layout or do a storyboard or, or videos or pictures, what do you need?
Speaker 1 00:06:33 Well, usually we'll start with a couple of emails back and forth and a phone discussion. And the main thing is to find out what you want to animate. So I have to learn a bit about the product or the process from the client, get up to speed, they know the product the best. So they'll explain it to me and what they, what their key selling points are and what they want to see in the animation. And by that, we just, uh, create a basic script. You know, bullet points are fine, we don't get into the, uh, fancy storyboarding or, or things like that. And then we also view if they have competitor videos, we have a look at those as well for examples. And then a big part of it is if you have a three D CAD available, which most manufacturers now deal in some form of 3d CAD, the solid works, Autodesk inventor, pro engineer, and all of those packages can spit out a file that I can use to create these animations. And that data set can be used downstream. Like we use it for marketing, which is pretty neat.
Speaker 0 00:07:47 So how long does it take to do an animation? I mean, it's probably how long is a piece of string, right?
Speaker 1 00:07:52 Yeah, exactly. It's it could be a few days. It could be a few months, it's all dependent on the overall complexity of the actual machinery or equipment and then B as the, what we're animating. So if there's, you know, different effects or things like that, like one animation I worked on was of a green combine and we had to show the individual grains traveling through this thing. So the complexity is the big part of how long it takes and then, you know, dial it back to the other. The easy example would be like something as small as a pen coming into thesis, you know, in 20 seconds and just showing, showing an exploded view of a pen.
Speaker 0 00:08:39 So how long should an animation be? I mean, we're all talking about these two minute videos or one minute videos, like, is that, is that what your thoughts are too?
Speaker 1 00:08:47 Yeah. I mean, you kind of tend to lose viewership. Like my kind of golden rule is 60 to 90 seconds just to keep the engagement there. And it also that 60 to 90 seconds has to be interesting video. So I try to get my clients to use minimal onscreen text. So bullet points so that you can read it. It's kind of difficult to have paragraphs of text and video at the same time. It's a bit much for the brain to process. So they're going to keep jumping back to visual communication because like everyone says a picture is worth a thousand words. So an animation is basically like a flip book of pictures. So you can really get a lot of cross without using words.
Speaker 0 00:09:33 And where's the final use for some of these animations that you're creating and what, what are the things can you do
Speaker 1 00:09:39 A lot of is just a trade show, videos, YouTube videos on there, you know, other YouTube channels for marketing websites and other, uh, big uses like stakeholder review. So if there's like a pre manufacturing stage where there's a design that needs to be passed in front of a board of directors or something, then you used for that as well. Sometimes also in non-marketing uses. So for training videos where the overall look doesn't have to be fancy or photo realistic, but you're actually explaining, uh, how to assemble something or how something works. That's also a good one and then still renders. That's a, that's actually a big part of the business is, um, I call it virtual photography. So you can take these Cod files that I referred to before. And you can create photorealistic renders of a product before it even exists. Some examples of that are a consumer product that is made overseas, that doesn't exist yet. They would bring it back here, but you're already doing, you're already doing all the marketing work upfront, and then you don't have to deal with, um, any photo studio issues with weird reflections or lighting or touch ups in Photoshop. It's all done rendering wise on our end.
Speaker 0 00:11:05 And we've talked about this before. Sometimes I really like in engineering videos to have some texts as a something that helps the viewer, what kind of languages can you do that we can
Speaker 1 00:11:18 Voiceovers a lot. They're not necessary, but a lot of time we'll put in voiceovers in various languages, if that's what the client requires, but I keep, I keep jumping back to this visual communication thing where you can with the right, with the right motions on the right actions, in your animation, you could explain things without a language barrier. So that's what we try to do initially. And then if we can't do that at that point, then the voiceover becomes the next step.
Speaker 0 00:11:49 Thank you for that. What are some of the projects that you've done? And I, that people look at you as a competitive advantage. And so they don't want you to advertise what you've done for them. Uh, and I know you signed on disclosures all all the time, so they can't talk about a lot of them. Yeah. There's, there's a bunch can't talk
Speaker 1 00:12:05 About, but I mean, everything that's, uh, that's on our website in our portfolio is, is usually on public domain already. So if it's hit their YouTube channel, um, I'm okay to share it. And, uh, but I go back to that, um, harvesting combine, cause that was a very challenging one. Usually the ones that I enjoy the most are the ones that are the most challenging for some reason, you know, if it's, if it's easy, it's, uh, it's, you know, he gets through the project quicker, but I like, I like the challenges of, uh, different techniques that I have to use. Like cutaway views are very well enjoy those and don't work for so many different industries that there's like medical industry animating a prosthetic leg was, was really interesting. Just several other sectors that, uh, automation, uh, so big, um, robot assembly lines where I'm given all the cycle times and these static robots that are sitting on the line and I've got this lay line layout and it's like, okay, here's the cycle time. Now we're going to animate this to this six second cycle time. I have to go through each station and create that.
Speaker 0 00:13:25 I remember what you and I did a project in the machine tool industry. And we came back to you after the project was done and said, Ooh, you know, we just need to have some little metal traps coming out of the, out of the tool. And it was like, no one had ever asked you for that before. So it was a big challenging project, but that's the beauty of three D animations is that you can keep bolting on different things to it. Exactly. And of course we use those images and trade shows and did brochures and PowerPoints and just,
Speaker 1 00:13:55 Yup. So
Speaker 0 00:13:57 Sounds very expensive. Uh, we should probably discuss pricing, like how much does an animation cost?
Speaker 1 00:14:03 Yeah, it goes back to their complexity discussion, but like, it could be as little as the $2,000 Mark and then we can climb up into the stratosphere really. But you know, you can climb easily up into the 20 to 30 K range depending on, on your process and your, your video that you want to create. So again, it's that, it's that reference from the pen to the automation line. There's a big variance there. That's all dependent on complexity. So
Speaker 0 00:14:36 We're recording this in May, 2020, and we're kind of in the middle of their COVID outbreak. How do you think animations will be impacted by that?
Speaker 1 00:14:46 Well, I mean, we already see that trade shows have been impacted and you know, even right now, I've had a few clients that have walked back from a trade show. That's been closed off, but they're like, well, let's, let's go ahead with this video because we'll put it onto our YouTube channels and show it online. I think with the travel restrictions and everything, I think that animations might become more important than ever so that you can do online meetings and explain your product to a prospective client in a meeting, show them the video and talk about your product online. Absolutely like a virtual trade shows or webinars or zoom or teams. It's the biggest act, perfect venue for that. Phil. Thanks very much for taking the time today. How can people find you and how can people go and see some of your work basically on the web would be
[email protected]. And there's an online portfolio there and a demo reel. And also look me up on LinkedIn and that's about it. Yeah. Great. Thank you. And thanks, Phil. And if you have an idea or an interesting company or technology, and you'd like to be a guest or nominate someone to be a guest on the robot nation podcast, please send me an email to robot nation
[email protected] and we'll see you next time.
Speaker 2 00:16:14 <inaudible>.
