You’ve got exceptional products, but the market is now saturated with everyone competing for eye-balls.
How can you stand out and speak authentically and convincingly to your audience? It sounds like it might be time to unlock the third dimension.
Adding the third dimension isn’t like cooking with an extra ingredient, it’s like making a whole other dish. The risks to your project increase with additional elements like 3D modelling, lighting your scene, texturing your assets, and those photorealistic renders? They take computers hours and hours to calculate.
You need a 3D animation partner that knows what can go wrong, and how to prevent it. That’s why we’ve been ISO 9001 certified; our quality is proven. Our 20 years combined experience delivering over 500 projects for our clients means we can help steer your project and ensure it stays in budget and meets your all important deadline.
The Power of 3D Animation
It doesn’t take much to be convinced that people are spending more and more time on phone screens, making your audience harder to impress, and more savvy to captivating content. (Hint: No one reads things anymore!).
With tools like Canva and CapCut becoming increasingly popular, it’s getting easier for people who aren’t professional designers, storytellers or animators to make generic, dull materials. 3D animation keeps you dynamic, engaging and different.
3D animation unlocks your need for flexibility and adaptability. Gone are the days of re-shoots when you update and innovate your products, simply tweak an asset and re-output a new animation!
3D animation dives deep, breaking complex into simple. A more engaged viewer is much more likely to convert. As 3D animations keep viewers engaged longer, they increase the likelihood of viewers taking your desired action.
Our 3D Animation Offerings
Our 3D animation pipeline will take you from sketch, drawing or engineering CAD file, through to strategic, glossy, immersive deliverables.
Customer 3D Modelling
Your audience wants to engage in a story where characters aren’t just figures but have emotion, narrative and purpose. With custom 3D character modelling, you get sculpted personas that resonate with your viewer.
Scene Design & World Building
Before anything moves, the universe has to be created. When you invest properly into a scene, it becomes more than a backdrop. A crafted environment design immerses your audience, introduces additional storytelling elements and elevates their experience.
Animation & Sequencing
This is the crucial part that lifts the deliverable from a static image, to something that lives and breathes. With precise, detailed animation sequencing, you gain realism, character and authenticity. It’s more than movement, it’s ensuring realism.
Lighting & Texturing
This can be make or break for a 3D animation. By getting detail and nuance into the texturing of models and assets, and being creative with lighting setups, the project goes from good to great. Whether you’re after realism or something more stylistic, a lot of the heavy lifting is done from this stage.
Post-production
The final step that ensures the sum is greater than its parts. Every sound, voice, character, special effect and movement is seamlessly woven together to enhance the narrative and ensure the objectives are met. It’s the magic touch that pushes your animation from being seen, to being felt.
Why Partner with Us for 3D Animation?
Experience
We were established in 2019, but our roots go back further to 2014. In our 5 years of trading, Tricks has delivered over 500 projects of all shapes and sizes. From working with government bodies, through to S&P 500 companies, all the way down to SMEs – we specialise in achieving our clients objectives through storytelling and animation.
Innovative
By taking a strategic approach, workshopping, and helping shape the brief, we ensure your objectives are exceeded. Bespoke and unique creative solutions, along with strategic thinking ensure your vision becomes an actionable deliverable.
Client-Centric
We’re rated by our clients 4.8 out of 5 stars. Our clients scored us on Quality (4.8), Cost (4.8), Schedule (4.7) and Willingness to Refer (4.9). Our reviews are conducted by an independent third party, and can be read in depth here
Advanced Tools
Technology is constantly changing and improving. We dedicate time to R&D each week to ensure our processes and tools are up to date and we can efficiently deliver our maximum creative potential within your brief and budget.
The Process: From Concept to Completion
To ensure your project is delivered on time, on budget and meets your objectives, you need to work with a 3D animation company with a bulletproof process. ISO 9001 certifies that we have the correct quality and processes to deliver on exactly what we say we will.
1. Initial Discussion
The vision is the starting point for every project. In the initial discussion, you lay out your foundations, pinpoint your objectives and measures of success. This turns dreams into goals, and creates the framework for us to design within.
2. Pre-Visualization
When the story is set, pre-visualization offers you a glimpse at the final outcome of the project. It’s key to setting the mood and flavour through various elements, colours, shapes, text design, lighting and much more! It’s the first opportunity to feel the final outcome.
3. Creation Phase
The heart of the animation journey. You see the transformation of ideas turning into 3D models, movements and story arcs. There’s many steps within this stage, but in essence, your narrative unfolds here.
4. Feedback
No one knows your company better than you. Your insights are key to moulding the project and staying on track. The process is collaborative throughout with plenty of check-in meetings, whether driven by milestones, or weekly alignments.
5. Final Render & Delivery
Once everything is crafted and seamlessly woven together, you have the final, polished animation ready to tell your story to the world. Your vision, brought to life, primed to leave the right mark on your audience.
Tricks Studio supplied high-quality work, and we were impressed.
Ejiro Gray – Sahara Group
See what our clients have to say...
Frequently asked questions
Every physical object has 3 dimensions, length, width and depth. In essence 3D animation creates that depth measurement by adding what’s known as the “Z-Axis” to the typical “X” and “Y” axes. This brings physicality, realism and depth to the animation. Think of products spinning and breaking apart, with a photo-realistic finish. 2D animation is more about flat images typically driven by an illustration style, 3D animation is more to do with detail models animated within an environment. This gives the depth and perspective, allowing for dynamic camera movements, and a much higher level of detail compared to flat 2D animations. Many 3D animations include simulations of real-world physics, like shampoo adverts showcasing fluids, or objects colliding with each other.
The duration of any project, whether 2D or 3D varies based on a calculation of complexity, length of deliverable and any specific requirements you may have. It’s crucial to give enough time to important stages like pre-visualization, modelling, animation and post-production. If there’s a specific date you have in mind, please don’t hesitate to contact us to see if it’s achievable.
Pre-visualization (or pre-viz for short) is where the mood and style of your outcome is designed and considered. Along with a storyboard to show the flow, the pre-viz showcases the final result over a handful of key moments (or frames as we call them). It helps align to your vision, sets expectations around the outcome and ensures the final deliverable matches your objectives. It’s a key stage to ensure the process runs as smoothly as possible to stay on time and on budget.
We’ll have pre-arranged feedback meetings to present creative drafts to discuss. We’ll provide a framework for supplying notes, markups and capture any direct discussions. If you have a specific feedback process, ie a compliance department, this should be factored into the brief at the beginning of the process.
The beauty of 3D animation is that it offers almost infinite possibilities and options. We’re limited only by time and budget. Extremely detailed scenes, hyper-realism, or physically accurate simulations all take time to craft and get right, so may require more resources. Every year 3D animation takes a huge step forward and continually improves.
Photorealism is a combination of high-quality models, physically accurate lighting techniques and detailed texturing. Often it is the imperfections in an image that make it feel real – think of film grain, over-exposure, bokeh of light for a few examples. Ensuring materials combine with light correctly is key to achieving something that looks real – think of light refracting through glass, bouncing off white walls vs black walls, etc. Photorealism comes down the details, and this is why Lighting and Texturing are crucial stages to a project.
Definitely! We call this compositing. This allows for real-life actors to interact with 3D elements, typically involving green-screen. It’s possible to integrate after the live-action has been captured, but the results are always best when both disciplines are considered together.
When we start any project, we map out a Gantt chart timeline to account for the various stages that we work through. We always include reasonable time for feedback and refinements. Deviating from this timeline with additional changes, or major changes, can cause delays to the project. It’s essential to have clear communication between us which is why you’ll have a dedicated project manager to help streamline and navigate the process.
There are a few 3D packages including Maya, Cinema4D, Houdini etc. Our pipeline is typically Cinema4D or Blender, using Redshift Renderer. If you have specific requirements for 3D packages please let us know in the brief.
Communication is king. If you have references of other projects you like, and why you like them, then that’s a great place to start. We’ll help work with you on a detailed brief to highlight objectives and outcomes to ensure what we create is right. Maintaining regular check-ins during production keep us aligned and ensure momentum throughout the project. The various stages of production like script writing, storyboarding, pre-viz, are all designed to bring your vision to life in an efficient and effective manner.
3D animation serves as the perfect tool for you to capture attention in the content-saturated landscape.
It simplifies complex ideas and tells immersive stories. 3D ensures you are future ready, keeping relevant amongst high competition, and leads to higher audience engagement and conversion.
Are you ready to see how 3D animation can bring your story to life? Call us on 01244 560 537, or fill out our online contact form to submit an enquiry.