3d - Which software to use to create professional fly-over/ fly-through animations?

I will need to create a high quality fly-over animation which penetrates the surfaces and reveals subsurface geology. The intended use is for demonstrations, presentations and a company website so it cannot include copyrighted data.

Available Data: I have high resolution satellite & aerial imagery, 20m resolution DEM for the entire area of interest, 10 x 10 km 1m resolution LiDAR data, subsurface geology in 3D DXF and ArcGIS multipatch features; basically all the data I would like to "fly over and through".

Software: I have ArcGIS 10 ArcEdtor with Maplex, 3D and Spatial Analyst, Access to MapInfo Professional (no experience), Google Sketchup Pro, Leapfrog Mining and CorelDraw X5 and Adobe Master Collection CS5 (limited experience) at my disposal.

I've seen some ArcGlobe and Google Earth animations and from what I have seen seems too choppy and the camera moves too fast and turns abruptly.

Here is an example of something I would like to create except that I need to also explore features beneath the surface. I will need some pop-up balloons to indicate points of interest similar to what's in the linked video as well as a compass or an arrow showing approximate north orientation.

I am only looking for suggestions how to create the "guts" of this animation; the actual fly over and into the data with the pop up labels and direction.

I would really appreciate any suggestions on:

• Recommended workflow for such animations (preferably using the tools I already have)


• Other software commonly used to create such animations

Please share links to any good examples.

Answer

Not sure if standard GIS packages are going to give you what you need. You might have to get into 3D animation/visualization packages such as Vue (paid, but not too $$, maybe around $1,000 US) or Blender (open source with HUGE community). I'd love to know what the NPS used to create the flyover you referenced.

I'm currently struggling with getting real world elevation data into Vue, it will only take USGS DEM format. Blender can take a greyscale image and render elevation from it. Here are a couple of screenshots I made of elevation data in Blender, although I haven't played with it much. Here is a very short flyover that someone else did in Blender.

Problem with a lot of these 3D animation/visualization packages, we have discovered, is that they are intended for use in creating fantasy worlds (Vue was used to create a lot of Avatar, for example), not real worlds, so support for real world data just isn't there yet - and we are now having to bridge the two, and it's tough.

As far as workflows, that's what I'm ironing out right now. Good thing is both Blender and Vue can be scripted with Python, so you can automate most everything. I am translating my elevation data to DEM with gdal_translate, then importing it into Vue.