Case Study URL:
http://www.sercomsolutions.com/

So tell us a little about yourself?
Paul: I have a Degree in Visual Communications from the Dublin Institute of Technology. I have worked in various companies in Dublin and Sydney, from 3 person startups to 50 employee ad agencies. I was let go from my last employment in 2001 and started freelancing to pay the mortgage. When I started to build a reputation and business  picked up, I started Magma Design in 2003. I now have 26 regular clients and the freedom to put extra time into my work for them.

How did you get your start with Swift 3D? How long have you been a Swifter?
Paul: I have often played with demos of 3DS max, bryce, Infini-D; anything that I could experiment with 3D modelling. When I storyboarded the Sercom animation, I needed 3D software with an easy learning curve, that could handle animation and would integrate with flash. That’s when I bought Swift 3D and became a swifter in earnest.

What Swift 3D projects have you done in the past? Any other work you’d like to share?
Paul: This was my first Swift 3D project.

What “real world use” led you to consider 3D as a solution?
Paul: My client is a procurement and logistics company. The SerCom storyboard follows a branded goods parcel from product design to customer delivery. The main ‘character’ is the parcel, which is essentially a 3D box, so it made sense to create a 3D environment to surround the story.

What was your biggest challenge with your project? How did you overcome the challenge?
Paul: I would say optimisation brought the biggest challenge. Specifically, bringing filesize down and bringing efficiency to the animation. The forum was invaluable, I got informed tips in record time from a friendly bunch! Between forum advice and hours of fine-tuning and testing I discovered ways to keep everything efficient while not losing the soul of the environment.

How did Swift 3D help you to meet your project goals?
Paul: By the time I had a skeleton storyboard I was researching what Swift 3D could do and how I could use it. From here on I was designing the animation with Swift 3d in mind. I knew I could import artwork from illustrator and start manipulating it immediately. 

What feature of Swift 3D did you find to be the most beneficial?
Paul: The ability save lighting was very useful. I find lighting 3D environments can be very challenging, so when you get it right it’s great to be able to export those settings and get consistency across separate scenes.
The object and child method of linking objects is invaluable. This is the kind of feature that is the mainstay of heavyweight 3D software, and the kind that makes Swift so powerful.

What is the overall benefit of Swift 3D to your company?
Paul: I love flat art, logotypes, clean graphics, typography; the ability to bring lush animation and time to the visual efficiency of flat art can create a great juxtaposition. No other tool can do that like Swift 3D does. For me, Swift 3D has no less than opened up great creative possibilities for my artwork, whether the finished art is animation, integration with video or a self-standing poster.

What types of projects do you plan on using Swift 3D for in the future? 
Paul: I want to play with character design, and bringing texture into 3D environments to create websites that are essentially ‘moving posters’.

Any tips or insight to your workflow / methods that you’d like to share with the community?
Paul: Replace repeated items in flash with symbols to reduce filesize and efficiency of animation. For example, the boxes in the mechanical arm animation. I imported the entire movie then stripped back anything that could be made into a symbol with properties that I could control in flash, like scale.

Export animated masks: You could use this to add texture to a shape from one symbol to keep filesize down, rather than exporting the texture with every frame of the animation.

Any additional comments, inspiration, ideas, food for thought you’d like to share with the community?
Paul: Push your clients! Be ambitious and take on a challenging project you know you can do justice to, even if it runs into your free time or your allocated budget. You can inspire your clients to try something braver than expected, and give them a result you are both proud of. You also have a great excuse to eat pizza while working late!