Is Chaos Vantage The Perfect Real Time Animation Tool for ArchViz Artists?
A few weeks ago I built a little test scene of an at home office space. It was nothing complicated. I just wanted to use it for doing some nice renderings of Cosmos Objects. In the end, I liked it so much that I wanted to take it further. I decided I wanted to animate it!
WHAT IS THE BEST WAY TO QUICKLY ANIMATE?
I had a few options available for animating this, but I wanted the animation to meet a few criteria:
I wanted it to be really close to the original renderings
I wanted to animate in real time
I wanted the process to be as fast and pain free as possible.
My first thought was to take it into Unreal Engine 5 using Datasmith, and I did in fact go this route. Unreal Engine certainly does meet requirement of real time animation. I have shown recently with other projects that it is a great tool for this (see this video) Unfortunately, the translation using Datasmith was going to require that I do some additional work to get it looking just like the original renderings, so it didn't meet my other requirements very well. Of course, Unreal Engine is much better at other things, but in this case it was not the right tool.
VANTAGE TO THE RESCUE
So, I turned to Vantage. Vantage is a bit limited in scope compared to something like UE5, but for this project, it fit the bill perfectly. In my opinion, if you are an archviz artist who is very familiar already with Vray, and all you want to to do is animate your existing renderings, Vantage is the ideal tool. There are multiple different ways to use -- live link vs. .vrscene export, for example -- but the important point is that it can give you real time feedback on your animation keyframes, and even generate finished frames for you in a relatively fast amount of time. Overall, it cuts down on the huge time demands of a typical animation project and makes it completely reasonable to create professional animations on time and within budget.
Using Vantage, I was able to take my renderings and turn them into a professional looking archviz animation in hardly any time at all. Animating with real time feedback is quick and intuitive, and the render times were totally reasonable as well. This really opens up the door for me offering more animations to clients where previously it would have been impractical.
WHAT IS THE WORKFLOW
In my case, I exported a .vrscene to Vantage and let Vantage do all the work from there. I mostly just animated cameras directly inside of Vantage. Perhaps I should have done more animating inside of Max, but I didn't (you'll see in the video some of the reasons). From there I was able to *relatively quickly generate a finished animation. In the end I also took my finished animation frames and did some post-processing in After Effects.
Overall, I really liked the result, and Vantage certainly proved itself as a worthy tool in my archviz arsenal, specifically for making quick animations of an existing project.
Check out the full video for a complete walkthrough of my process, and for a look at the finished results.
