Learning 3D Animation

Originally Posted by Cellius

The interface is the most daunting thing in the universe, but it's an extremely intuitive piece of software:

I was going to rip that statement to shreds, but you may be right. I can guarantee you, though, that the most difficult interface to get the hang of is Blender's. There are one or two or three functions mapped to each key, and each Ctrl, Alt, and Shift combinations of each key, and they all do different things under different contexts. If you know what you're doing you can probably do it pretty quickly, but damn. It's a really, really steep learning curve. Not to mention it's incredibly hard to find a decent tutorial that'll help you out there. =)


Anyway, back on topic... The big 3D programs that I know of are Maya (already mentioned, twice), 3ds Max, and Lightwave. There's also Blender (see link above), which is noteworthy for the fact that it's free and open-source, but the saying "you get what you pay for" isn't completely untrue. It's not very user-friendly at all. as a matter of fact, it hates you.

Maya and 3ds Max are the two big ones, but I used Lightwave for a long while and I loved it to death. I was never very good at anything, though, and I never took any classes with it. Maya's got a free student edition (or... at least I know they used to have a student version; but that was years ago...) that lets you do most everything, but IIRC it slaps a huge logo on any renderings you do. There was also GMax, a model/animation tool with most of the capabilities of 3ds Max, sans the ability to render at all. Again, that one might not be around any more; it's been a long while. If you're only interested in animation techniques, then those would be good enough, at least to work with -- you wouldn't be able to render stuff, but you could play it back in realtime and so on.



So the tools are good and all by themselves, but unless you find a good book or you take a course, I'd wager you're going to have a difficult time studying on your own. I tried doing stuff in Lightwave on my own when I was younger, by finding tutorials online and stuff (I never bought a book), and I got pretty far but it never went anywhere. I later took a course (categorized under 'drafting technology'; I never would've found it unless someone mentioned it to me) in 3ds Max, and I learned everything and more in much, much less time. I would recommend, though, since you're working fulltime and it's not like you can push that aside, that you try to find a good book (or two or three) and learn from them when you have the time -- though you'll find that once you get going it's hard to stop. It's a lot of fun, at least for me. ^___^


So then.... I don't have any books to recommend, though. =\ I know there are a lot of talented 3D artists here at GFF, so maybe one of them will see the thread and pop in with some help.

Jam it back in, in the dark.