Platform Solutions – ThingWorx
The Challenge
PTC came to us because they needed a video for their Thingworx platform – a powerful tool that brings efficiency and scalability to the process of building smart city solutions.
The Approach
Sometimes, it’s better to sell an idea than a product. Rather than talk about the product itself, we decided to demonstrate the benefits of working with a platform, knowing that Thingworx is the clear choice once someone adopts that way of thinking.
To realize this approach, we looked at visual concepts leaning into the need for a platform. For example, an early concept showed services as tetris/puzzle tiles, and the difficulty that would be assembling a puzzle without a place to put it.
EARLY STYLE FRAMES
Ultimately, we landed on two separate visual concepts, to show the contrast between the old way and the platform based way. The old way would be represented by having to “cut” a service to fit its placement, demonstrating the manual and forced nature of building custom solutions per-need. The platform-based way was shown with a visual metaphor of “growing” solutions out of their need.
FINAL DESIGN DIRECTION
Execution
Once we landed on the growing city concept, we knew it would be best accomplished with real 3D rather than with isometric 2D designs. The design frames were translated into 3D with Cinema4D. Though we knew we wanted to keep the look mostly flat, rendering with Octane allowed us to incorporate subtle soft shading that gave the designs a really tangible feel.
