Thread: Tell me about computer animation

So, you DON'T use blender?

No, I'm good at keyboard input, I'm very efficent at blender. At work I have access to Autodesk, but I'll stick with my good old free Blender. My only beef with Blender is it's render speed, but you can swap out the rendering engine with Indigo or Yafray if you want.

I have not yet used Blender, but from what I have learned, there is a "BURP" rendering farm.

I have access to a render farm, but that's cool to see that they are doing that.

I've done several things using blender, here are some screen shots
However nowadays I'm not using blender anymore. It's fun, but it takes way too much time. I think I already forgot the keyboard shortcuts anyway



The duck is fully rigged, including face controls

This was for an animation of a crack in ice (like Ice Age) the camera would follow the crack getting bigger and further, and then at the end there would be a blender logo or something. Final rendering & compositing took about 12hrs I think due to motion blur
edit:

Hey there. I've used many 3d modeling packages (don't ask how lol), but the best in my opinion are Maya and 3DS max. I did it for a school project and liked it enough to stick to it as a hobby.

Well, 3DS max takes a while getting used to, but fairly easy to use once you got a hang of it. Good for modeling things that have low-medium amount of polygons, unless you have a very good computer. It has some amazing plug ins though.

Maya on the other hand takes a lot longer to learn but a very powerful software. It can run smooth at a very high count of polygons (which means more details), while the same amount of polygons will lag like crap in 3DS max.

How to get started is to look at the tutorials, which can be exceedingly frustrating and annoying because all you do is watch the same screen for a long time and the mouse is the only thing that moves and at times it's hard to follow. But you'll get better the more you follow the tutorial.

But if you just want to animate something simple as visualization of the plot of a book, get blender, it's free and very good, although I never used it, I heard good things about it.