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I often find videos of construction animations like this one or this one where the construction steps are detailed. Out of interest I would like to know which software is most probably used to make these kind of animations.

Asking the authors of the videos unfortunately didn't help.

(Screencapture) enter image description here

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    Hi. Welcome to GDSE. There's no way to tell which particular software was used, but definitely some 3D animation software, such as Blender, Maya, Cinema 4D, etc. All of these would be capable of making such an animation. Please note that video editing/video related questions are generally off-topic here. There is a Blender Stack Exchange though, also a Video Production Stack Exchange.
    – Billy Kerr
    Jul 31, 2022 at 10:53
  • Well i would know how to do these animations in. Maya, Blender, 3DSmax, Creo, Solid-works and Rhino no problem. Though they probably do use 2-3 different software for this. In anycase its not really fruitful to ask what I or the author uses. Question is what software can you use? I mean what 3d modelling application do you know?
    – joojaa
    Jul 31, 2022 at 19:03

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I know you are not dissecting your question too much, but asking a general one.

The examples you showed have several components.

  1. They are built obviously in 3D software. You can google a list of the most widely used, but we need to limit your search because there are many different modeling techniques. Some are used to make organic stuff, some others to create landscapes, clothing, etc. You name it.

So, first of all, look for software used for hard surface modeling.

  1. Obviously it has realistic materials applied and a nice-looking rendering. That specific look (Pocoyo Style) is one called Ambient Occlusion. It is a fast way to render images without "too complex" calculations.

  2. Some of the pieces are simple keyframes. "This piece goes here at second X". But some are a series of them consecutively. This needs to be controlled parametrically. Normally you use software for motion graphics.

  3. Then, you need to look for "the usual suspects" used in the Netherlands? or France? But probably that is not necessary.

  4. There are some other issues, for example, if the cross sections are prepared based on some other part of a process, let's say CAD software. But as they are only for presentation purposes, I think that is not a real element here.


There are many programs that could do this and, again I do not know which one they used. But for the "parametric" animation, I would look into Cinema 4D, 3D Max and Blender.

For the price (free but not cheap at all) and the accessibility, (you can use it right now) I would use Blender.

Look for "Blender Geometry nodes" and "Blender Animation Nodes" on youtube.


I must add that animation nodes is an add-on up to Blender 2.93.

Some animations can be done on the latest build of Blender 3.2 with the included Geometry nodes.

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    Your comment "free but not cheap at all" really cracked me up. I have for brief periods of my life had to use Maya, Cinema 4D & Blender. Of the three, Blender definitely comes at the highest cost to sanity & nearby throwable objects. ;)
    – Tetsujin
    Jul 31, 2022 at 18:04
  • @Tetsujin nobody says its free, in usability sense just the software is free. I agree that blender had one of the worst user interfaces out there. But at least they have now rectified the most glaring errors. For a long time now i have pointed out that both blender and inkscape demonstrate why opensource can not do good GUI's. But turns out that the current gen opensource developers are indeed much better at this than the previous one so there's hope. But not there yet.
    – joojaa
    Jul 31, 2022 at 19:00
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    My question was indeed a quite general one, but your answer really pointed me into the right direction. Especially the Blender animation nodes. Thank you
    – EsTeGe
    Jul 31, 2022 at 20:29
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    And the comment about not being cheap is because sometimes we consider "free" as something not really worth it, like bad quality. In the current state of Blender that is not the case. And helping develop the GUI of an open source project could be an interesting option for designers as a contribution to humanity. :)
    – Rafael
    Jul 31, 2022 at 21:09
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    TIL Pocoyo style is a thing. It did look very familiar!
    – curious
    Aug 1, 2022 at 19:30

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