Are you looking to create explainer videos that will help take your product idea to your customers? Would you like to demonstrate why your potential customers must choose you over other competitors, in a succinct, yet compelling way?

Add the magic of 3D animation to make your business ideas come alive and tell the stories themselves. Create captivating and visually appealing explainer videos that will unravel your business ideas and grab the attention of the viewer.

So, how does this magic happen? What are the steps involved? Read on to know more.

The art of creating animations can be broadly categorized into 3 main stages: pre-production, production, and post-production. The concept of your explainer video is planned and developed in the pre-production stage. The actual animation happens in the production phase. The third and the final stage in creating an explainer video, is the post-production. Post-production involves rendering the animation frames, editing the pieces of animation, adding the soundtrack and compositing the animation.

With this in mind, let us understand the steps involved, in detail,  in creating animations using 3D models.

Step 1: Script and storyboards (Pre-production)

The first step in creating an explainer video is conceptualizing your ideas in the form of a story, called a script. You then visualize the script in the form of a storyboard. The storyboard is a screen-by-screen sketch of your story.

Step 2: Building a 3D model (Production)

Your storyboard gets transformed into a 3D model in this step. Characters, environment and props are modeled in this step. While creating an explainer video, simple models are used in order to keep the file size manageable.

Step 3: Texturing (Production)

Texturing is adding colors, material, dirt and even 2D images on the 3D model to enhance the look, feel and design of the model. Again, in an explainer video, basic texturing is applied.

Step 4: Rigging (Production)

For a 3D model to act and emote, it needs to be animated. To achieve this, animators create 3D skeletons and attach them to the 3D models. This process is called rigging.

Step 5:  Lighting (Production)

Lighting sets the look and tone of the scene. A single directional light or the default light available are usually used in the explainer videos.

Step 6:  Animation (Production)

The puppet is now ready to come alive! The animation is all about giving life to a 3D model. While creating an explainer video, simple machine animations are used.

Step 7:  Rendering of the animation (Post-production)

Next comes rendering of the animation created in an image sequence. It is important, but a time-consuming step in an animation production pipeline.

Step 8:  Compositing (Post-production)

Compositing involves adding special effects and editing the raw renders to include other required components of the video including on screen text.. Everything from color correction to adding depth of field is done in this stage.

Step 9: Music and voice over

No animation is complete without audio. Before exporting the video, soundtrack and voiceover are added.

Step 10: Editing and final video output

Your explainer video is now almost ready. The renders and audio are edited and checked to ensure synchronization. The composited renders, music and foley are compiled and edited to ensure that everything is in synchronization. The video is then exported into a format that is suitable for broadcasting.

So, this is how you can create animations for explainer videos using 3D modeling irrespective of the software that you choose to use.

That’s all folks!