Industrial & Training Animation

Most of our industrial work so far has been for Tekatron, a maker of unmanned ground platforms, and most of it was made before the hardware was finished. The W-UGV I launch animation introduced the platform at SAHA EXPO 2026. The PALEM prototype film was made at a very early stage, to find out whether the proportions and the payload deck read correctly before anything was committed to metal.

That is the strongest reason to animate an industrial product: the film can exist before the machine does. The launch, the trade stand and the sales deck are ready while engineering is still working, and when the design changes, the scene is re-rendered rather than reshot. For the Griffin prototype, each revision was rendered into the same scene so every version was presented on the same terms.

Defence products have constraints of their own. They are rarely photographed in the field, the trade show date does not move, and the same platform has to be shown in several configurations and theatres. Our Tekatron work covers tracked UGVs in casualty-evacuation and logistics configurations, a hybrid platform that drives on tracks and flies for short duration, and a carbon fibre weapon tripod, rendered across desert, mountain, snow and urban environments.

For Palem, the stills were rendered in Blender and the prototype was also placed into environments in Unreal Engine, which is the difference between a picture of a vehicle and a scene the client can move a camera through while the hardware is still being built.

Cutaways, transparent housings and exploded sequences show the mechanism a photograph cannot reach. Because the model is your engineering geometry, the parts move along their real axes, in the order they were designed to go together. An exploded view usually runs from a single control that opens and closes the whole assembly, which makes it as useful on a looping trade stand screen as in a sales presentation.

The hard part is rarely the animation. It is establishing the correct order of parts, which usually means a conversation with whoever engineered the product, and it is worth having before anything moves.

The same model that sells a machine can teach people to use it. An assembly, commissioning or maintenance procedure becomes a sequence of numbered steps, with part numbers and quantities on screen and inset views for the fixings that go wrong. It is the format we already use for assembly instruction films, applied to equipment rather than flat-pack furniture.

Safety training gains the most from it. A film can show the wrong way of doing something as clearly as the right way, from any angle, without anyone being put at risk to demonstrate it, and on-screen text can be translated without re-rendering the film.

An industrial film rarely runs in one place. The same master is cut into a silent loop for a trade stand screen, short versions for LinkedIn, stills for a brochure or a datasheet, and, where it helps the sale, a real-time scene a salesperson can move through on a laptop. Because every version comes from the same model, a design change updates all of them rather than one.