I want to do something like this beautiful animation. I was wondering if anyone had any tips on how to go about it.Thanks.
Step 1: get really, really good at planning
Step 2: get really, really good at everything else
Unfolding the road is probably done with a subdivided plane rigged with an armature to allow it to unfold in that way. The expanding houses and trees could be done with fairly simple shape keys - starting with complete building and collapsing each floor. You can automate the creation of a city using a particle system but actually getting everything to expand on cue would take some work.
Hmm…I’m not sure it’s that “simple” to use shape keys for the expanding buildings. I think he used a cloth simulation and reversed the keyframes. I’ve done some experiments with it and seems to have a similar look.
The buildings look like animated noise to me.
@OldScratch Tried making shape keys. They’re not so “simple”. Not sure if you’re trying to talk down to me but I obviously know I could make shape keys. It’s making an organic, paper like fold that I’m not sure how to go about without spending many, many hours.
@Lumpengnom What do you mean animated noise?
I still think that he ran a cloth simulation and made specific loop cuts to have it collapse a certain way. Also think he triangulated the meshes.
Anyone else have any suggestions for a technique?
If you displace a mesh with a noise texture and animate the noise map it will look like this.
The noise fades out as well. On the one hand the noise decreases with time. You can simply plug a multiply node in front of the displacement output and animate that.
The noise also fades out towards the top. The higher the building the less noise (in some cases this is reversed).
This can be easily done by letting the noise texture fade out with a gradient node.
Running simulations for that amount of buildings would require a lot of time.
+1 Lumpengnom,
I tried this method but instead of a gradient node i used a vertex weight proximity modifier and cube mesh as a target to influence the weights, maybe a animated gradient is easyer.
I tried also to bake a cloth simulation to shapekeys but the shapekeyresult was linear ( the whole building colapse at once and not step by step starting from the ground).
Not trying to talk down to you. I still have plenty to learn myself. I’m coming to Blender from a stop motion background so spending hours on things is just what I’m used to.
At least now I know about this animated noise technique. That should save me some time in future 
@Lumpengnom do you know of a good tutorial on this?
@Kazinger That’s a cool add on! So, what did you use to deform the house?
I don´t think a tutorial would be useful. The basic technique is very simple.
The difficult part is finding the correct parameters to make it look good and that depends on your geometry.
I love that animation in this video.
If someone manages to get a similar result with this displace mesh with noise texture technique, I would be grateful if you could share a .blend example even if this is done just with a cube.
Nice, I had never used VertexWeightProximity modifier. Learned something new here.
Thanks!
Edit:
Cool, also a subdivided plane (the ground) could be the target object in the modifier.
I couldn’t leave this alone without having a quick go at a proof of concept. This is half an hour playing around with shape keys. Watching the video in slow motion, I’m pretty sure he uses this method at least for a couple of his tall buildings.
And this is the blend file, for what it’s worth: http://www.pasteall.org/blend/39583
oh that is much more easy.
Edit The displacement modifier is the fast way.
If you want shape keys use the animall addon but it will take months.
Shape keys and animall seem like overkill, origin at bottom, scale it on z and keyframe the strength of displace. Leave the mesh halfway up and change the displace texture/params for different fold looks.
Paper.blend on dropbox
Man, I learned so much. I really appreciate you guys! I wish I could give you all some chocolate.
I know nothing about making animation, but it is really awesome!:yes: