3D animation: Video vs Interactive

We can’t imagine our life without 3D animation anymore. From the morning till the deep night we are surrounded by the all kinds of adverts, explainers, product presentations and movies. Many thousands of digital agencies and freelancers compete with each other striving to deliver the most engaging 3D content to their customers which, in turn, present their products online to millions of consumers.

Still, 3D animation has become routine. It is now hard to strike a grown-up with 3D, and it is even more difficult to motivate a customer to buy a product by just showing them a minute of a carefully-choreographed promo video. You need something even more engaging. It is absolutely mandatory for you to stand out from the crowd. For this reason, you need something really addictive, say like em… video game!

Have you ever thought about why video games are so popular? The main reason is that you are no longer a spectator but rather an active participant that creates a new personally aligned reality. In addition to that, real-time 3D offers a lot more things. The possibility to rotate and zoom the camera alone allows you to observe things at any angle and detail. Non-linear scenarios when an observer controls their choices is yet another distinguishing feature of interactive experiences.

So how all this can be applied to the real life? How to make your 3D animations, visualizations and video explainers look and feel like a game, to which your customers will immerse themselves entirely? The answer lies in using real-time renderers rather than leveraging the traditional 3D computer graphics rendering approach.

You might be familiar with Unity, Unreal Engine and other such tools, but they won’t help much here because they are not optimized enough and don’t work well for the web. Therefore, you’d rather consider software that specifically targets web browsers.

Why targeting the web is so important? The answer is simple. There is no media or platform more convenient for distributing content than the Internet. Indeed in the modern times, customers won’t like the idea to download and install anything, they just used to obtain all the information from websites.

So if we’re targeting the web we need the right tools. There are plenty of them ranging from programming libraries such as Three.js and Babylon.js to artist-friendly all-in toolkits such as Verge3D. They allow for creating web-based experiences that run in any web browser and mobile device. Interactive 3D animations can be seamlessly blended with any other website content too.

3D artists who are familiar with Blender, 3ds Max, or Maya can start creating with Verge3D right away for it runs on top of these popular 3D modeling and animation software. With Puzzles, Verge3D’s intuitive visual scripting tool, even beginners can create complex interactive applications completely without coding.

So you have two choices now. You can stick to the traditional video approach or you can step out of the crowd and stun your customers with something they never imagined before!