In the beginning stages of ACM, FarmTRX commissioned us for a handful of content that included whitepapers, messaging, and four case studies. Most ambitious, though, was an idea their head of sales mentioned in passing during one of our meetings. The idea was for a video that would change from a blueprint-style animation to footage of a combined harvester running. That began a slew of new 3D work under the FarmTRX umbrella.
FarmTRX Combine Blueprint Videos
The selling piece for FarmTRX is that their hardware can fit onto any year, make, or model of combine harvester. This means the regular farmer would be able to modernize without having to upgrade their whole combine harvester. To illustrate that point, I made four videos with four different makes and models of combine harvesters, some new, some old.
This meant that I would have to source footage and 3D models of the same make, model, and year combine. This is way easier said than done and it took a good bit of time. After sourcing the 3D files, I needed to edit them, rig them, and get them ready for grease pencil (the tool used to outline the equipment). After rendering out the 3D piece, I edited them together in After Effects to make the video come together. We made one version looping (shown below) and one version with music, an animated intro, and an animated outro.
FarmTRX Unboxing Video
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I was given CAD files for the Yield Monitor, Moisture Sensor, Quick Connect Sensors, and GPS antenna. A script was written and a voiceover was given to match animation pacing. I was able to source a combine harvester model, tablet, laptop, phone, and a drill models as well. Everything required minor to major editing to the models to work for animation and the environment.
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Everything else: The boxes and sleeves, the cables on the equipment, the inside of the clean grain elevator, the drill bits and attachments, and the isolated clean grain elevator at the end. Textures and colors were all done procedurally in the EEVEE render engine.
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Since receiving the first voiceover, there were several round of revisions to the copy and the style of some pieces. So revisions called for new wording or additions to the messaging, others were about physical product accuracy in the modeling. These changes prompted rework and increase the scope quite a bit. We learned a lot through this project and grew tremendously.
This project took me roughly 80 hours of dedicated work to complete, or around two weeks.
Happy with the results, to the point of tears, the head of sales gave us another request, but this one was going to be bigger. They wanted to make an unboxing video where the customer could see what exactly they would get after purchasing and what to do next. They specifically didn’t want a “talking head” video, they wanted it all in 3D.