Hi
i know these kind of question are asked already but i want to know how much will take mine based of these info im going to give.
I’m new to blender and 3D world let say using it about 3 months . recently i got serious and i want to make a animated short movie around 5 min or lesser. ( it doesn’t exceed more than 7 ).
here its what movie will look like :
1- it doesn’t have dialogs and sound effects its a musical short movie so there is no lip sync and these kind of stuffs
2- its not open world , i mean it takes in a dark castle with narrow hallways mostly, some prisons , stone walls ,floor and some light objects like candle are visible.
3- there is not much characters in it only a female and male and some other prisoners.
4- the most things they do for animations are walking, running , looking around using objects and some face emotions.
5- its semi-realistic , i mean i don’t intend to do very realistic, i want to make it just feels like serious, not very cartoonish not very realistic let say 75% realistic.( maybe i go fully realistic but i don’t want to make it look real, u know what i mean ? )
so based on these How much time do think it needs to get it done with good quality?
It took me 4 years to do mine and it’s 5 minutes long. Everything depends on the amount of details you intend to show, if you aim to go low poly and very basic rigging, and with few environments, you could do it in some months. But keep in mind that you’ll have to model, unwrap, rig, skin, texture, light, composite … etc. This is a relly big amount of work but the satisfaction is worth the effort.
Yes that’s a fact to consider too, some of my frames took more than onr hour to render, hopefully there are some very nice solutions like Sheepit nowadays. And you’re right, a storyboard is essential in such a project, not only to estimate the amount of work but also as a basis and you constantly have to refer to it when working.
The way I see it there are two main things: 1. the idea; and then 2. not to stop working until it’s good. A lot of people stop when it’s ‘good enough’ I think that’s wrong. ‘Oh but I am learning…’ No! Stop learning to make crappy animations no one likes, make it short, make it good. It’s better to make an animation 30 seconds long - which is actually plenty of time to tell a short story visually, but make it good. It’s better this way. You get more satisfaction yourself when you impress others and that motivates you. You don’t need to be a writer, take some story that is written, take a joke, take funny 30 seconds that happened in your life. But hey, start with an idea. A list of what the animation is not going to have or not going to be be sounds like a good start on a way to failure.
How long is a piece of string. It could take anything from 1 month to one year, like others said depends on how good you are at using the software, how detailed it is and render times.
Maybe hang on for Eevee as that will render MUCH faster. Like hours into minutes.
I have done a few short animations and it took a few weeks because I was learning as I went along. I laid out my scene and then ran into something I didn’t know how to do, like smash a hole in a wall or spill some liquid, so onto YouTube, watched some tutorials, did some tests then incorporated that into my movie.
I do animations for the jokes in them. My renders look like crap because I cut them down to the basics in cycles, which is what I want to speed up renders. I try to get renders down to 1 to 3 minutes a frame. For just the animation itself, I normally figure a day per character per 10 seconds when allocating time. And really take MartinZ’s response to heart. I started doing long movies that looked liked crap and five years later, I’m finally getting the hang of it. You might save yourself at least four years working little 10 second intervalsrather than go the way I did. If you need animation help, I would recommend starting with Tradigital Blender by Hess. Although old, it still is very helpfu for showing one the way Blender’s animation tools work. There are lots of other references and tutorials that can help such as Blender Cookie. I know it’s tempting to get your ideas down on a movie cause you want to show yourself you can do it, but Patience, young grasshopper. Get the basics down. Save yourself years of grief.
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