Hilti Exhibition Animation
About the project
For the HILTI exhibition in Schaan in Lichtenstein I animated this tour through their history. The size of this animation, which was 8K wide so 4x FullHD, made this one a tricky job and I had to manage the ressources like a maniac.
Client: Hilti, Zero Division GmbH
Software used: Adobe After Effects, Trapcode MIR
From layout to animation
Chilidesign.at made a great design for this animation and I was thinking about which plugins would be capable of pulling it off in 8K while still be manageable and dynamic enough so that I could change the timing and the position of everything on the fly. My first guess was Plexus but after a few attempts I figured that this was just too big for Plexus and for After Effects with all the lights and points and shadings so I tried out my second guess which was Trapcode MIR and boy did this work like a charm.
Content Hub
This red hub is hovering from left to right, connects itself with white lines and dots with the content and with a physical tool in front of it. Everything is hovering around and has a position-noise modifier applied to it for the random movement. So, some tricky programming had to be done to connect everything to stay in place and still be time-independent.
One gradient to rule them all
First I built an animated gradient that told every single layer in the main comp where the action was and what they had to do. The bright parts told MIR to open up and the noise to go crazy. The darker parts did the opposite, of course. The magic thing is that the gradients' position was linked to the x of the red hub, which is a 3D layer so a 3D to 2D position coordinates conversion had to be done first.
Building the look
These three layers are three different Trapcode MIR layers which are all linked to the gradient. In the end I could animate only the red hub and got all MIR layers to cooperate. I separated the MIR layers because I wanted the look to be as dynamic as possible.
Animated and attached
I animated several different buttons for different purposes, most of them in 3D. Because the hub is a collapsed 3D layer and is moving in all 3 dimensions I had a hard time finding a solution for the xyz to xy conversion I needed to move the gradient layer. Eventually I found a script solution that did exactly that!
Looped
Another reason to go with Trapcode MIR and the gradient was that this had to be one perfect loop animation. Clocking in at around 6 minutes I couldn't just invert the animation all from 6 minutes to zero because the noise would affect the animation too heavily so I just animated the hub from right to left and overlapped the last seconds.
