Anatomy of a Surgical Animation: The TVASurg Method - TVASurg

Abstract

Presented as a "BMClass" on November 28th, 2021 for the Biomedical Communications Alumni Association's annual "UnCon" event, this presentation is a demonstration of our production process for surgical animations at TVASurg. A recent solo video and a recent team video are presented to walk viewers through two different scenarios, and show some of the different considerations that must be made depending on the project structure.

We show how we utilize features such as Layers and Takes in Maxon's Cinema 4D to handle animation projects with many shots (in the range of 20-40 per video). At TVASurg we make extensive use of the Notion app for team organization and project communications, use several methods for sharing and tracking changes including Annotation tags to make notes directly in the C4D scene files, and have begun to favour FBX for transferring models between C4D and Pixologic ZBrush to take advantage of some key features that file format provides.

This presentation will cover many features within software tools, but more significantly, will provide an overview at the larger scale of a project management lens, with lessons that can be applied to projects regardless of software preference

Video Timestamps

00:00 Introduction

01:49 PART 1 : SETTING UP THE PROJECT

02:30 Notion for Project Management

03:10 Base 3D assets

06:15 C4D Annotations

08:19 3D Scene prep

11:42 3D cameras

15:01 3D storyboards

17:19 PART 2: COMPOSITING

17:56 Project folder structure

18:36 Audio pacing in AE