Reducing the Cost of Litigation Visuals for Attorneys and Experts

It seems we’re asked the question every week by attorneys and expert witnesses during our initial case consultations: “So will I be spending like $50,000 on this animation?” The answer from us, of course, is usually an enthusiastic “no.” Remember, there are many “drivers” that contribute to the total cost of animation production.

Cost drivers for animation production usually include items such as:

3-D Model Production
3-D Model “Rigging”
3-D Environment Creation
Motion Sequencing
Lighting Effects

We’ll discuss some of these in more detail below.

3-D Model Production and Rigging

First are the vehicle models themselves. These models are the “skin” that make up the 3-dimensional representations of the vehicles you see moving around in crash animations. These models are often purchased on third-party websites for a few hundred dollars. That’s not so bad. Where it gets expensive is work need for the animator to “rig” the vehicle. This is because the vehicles come as “solid” mesh of polygons, where the polygons can be thought of as “welded” frozen together. You don’t want paperweights moving around in your video, so the animator (who is usually using a general-purpose animation app like 3DS Max or Maya) must typically do additional work to create wheels that can steer and spin, thereby increasing the total cost to you. Since we at Crash Animation Studios specialize in the use of Virtual CRASH software for our animations, which helps us keep total costs low. Why? With Virtual CRASH, vehicles are already “rigged” and ready to use for animations “out of the box.” This saves you thousands of dollars because you don’t need to pay us to rig vehicles to have moving parts!

3-D Environment Creation

3-D Environment production can be a huge cost driver for your animations. Much will depend on what data is used to produce the environment. The most cost-effective way to product an environment is to simply lay out the animation over a simple Google Earth image; however, this often lacks the immersive qualities attorneys and experts are looking for. For truly 3-D environments, clients often must chose between having “solids” created specifically for the scene (custom made textured polygon mesh buildings, trees, etc) versus using a “point cloud” representation of the scene. A point cloud is huge list of points that contain position and color information about every sampled point in space in the crash scene. Point clouds are generated either from a 3-D laser scanner device or from a photogrammetry software application, such as Pix4D, where photographs from a drone are processed to create an bird’s-eye aerial view of the scene as was as a 3-D point cloud representation. Using point cloud data has the added benefit of potentially including forensic evidence left at the scene such as gouge marks and tire marks. If this is a good option for your case, our team can fly a drone at the crash scene to produce a point cloud representation.

Motion Sequencing

Another typical cost driver is related to setting up the sequence of motion within the animation software. Animators who use general-purpose animation apps, such as 3DS Max or Maya, will spend hour upon hour laying out “key frames” which are used to fine-tine vehicle motion. This is indeed a time-consuming process. Since Virtual CRASH has a streamlined workflow tailor-made for visualizing auto-accidents, our team at Crash Animation Studios can reduce the expense associated with laying out motion sequences.

Lighting Effects

With Virtual CRASH, we can quickly and easily add lighting to your crash scene to make visually compelling visuals for nighttime accident cases. Because Virtual CRASH comes ready-made a lighting solution, specifically made for auto-accident cases, this is yet another place we can reduce the cost to you.

Contact Us!

All of this helps to beat down unnecessary production costs to you. As a result, our typical animations run between $3,000 to $5,000. Large projects typically come in less than $10,000. No, you don’t need to spend $50,000 to $100,000 for an amazing visual for your case. Give us a call to discuss your case.