I go to Hash Animation Master’s website and I find tons of excellent stills and animations. Yet I see few animations made in Blender that last longer than 2 minutes. A worse scenario would be in the Anim8or community- where an animation of any length was a major acheivment.
I am not asking where the animations are, I’m asking if is is difficult to make one in Blender. And why there are so few.
it takes a lot of effort to make an animation
and, it wouldn’t surprize me if the blender community is smaller, but certainly most of them are not motivated enough to make something requiring that much effort
[I’m certainly not that motivated for example, but I’d argue my focus lies in other areas]
Well ive made ALOT of test animations, but not with no web space being of little importance they never get posted.
A Blender animation won the last IRTC animations contest.
Yes, the quality of the IRTC anims are usually not that great… but animations aren’t hard, and with new features in 2.34 like the moving static particles (heh) and force fields, its only getting better 
The tool is certainly capable of it, and that’s exactly what I am doing it with it. Not still-pictures: animations, exclusively.
It does take a lot of work to produce an animation. It’s not really the same as producing a still-picture, not at all. Easy to see why people gravitate toward one or the other.
Also: I’m not doing work that’s meant to impress, to wow a studio-audience or win an Oscar. It’s meant to be used in a museum kiosk and to convey information in about two minutes. I want the viewer to see it, instantly accept it as “realistic but not-quite-real,” then watch the darned thing not as a work-of-art but as a somewhat-interesting source of information.
I am actually an ex Animation Master user (see that bacteriophage I have as my avatar, that’s done in A:M). At Siggraph '99 A:M was the only package that impressed me as far as ease of use and price ($300 commercial) and I can say that as someone who has made animations longer than 2 minutes in both Animation Master and Blender, that the time it takes to make an animation in A:M compared to Blender is not that much different. Yes, I feel that armature and “skinning” as it’s called in Blender is easier in A:M, but the process is almost identical. However, Blender has a much faster rendering engine than A:M (10 seconds of VHS quality video took me 8-12 hours to render in A:M). So, in that case Blender can create Animations faster than most packages.
I feel that the reason there are not as many animations for Blender is because it doesn’t have as large a fan base as A:M does, but secondly that wasn’t the primary focus. Blender is built for speed, ANIMATION Master is built for animating. The whole paradigm of using spline-based quads was so that joints would look more natural when they where animated. Also, I feel Blender does lack a little bit in the UI when it comes to animation, which is why I haven’t touched the advanced animation options. The tools are there, the code is there, but there is just a steeper learning curve for Blender’s advanced animation tools.
And I also believe that, on average, there are less Blender users that want to make animations as compared to people that use programs like Animation Master.
in 2.34 its not hard to make an animation its just tedious as hell and for most computers rendering an animation is a hell of a lot of work. a 10 second detailed animation (when i say detailed im talking about a robot with hydraulic piping and the works) took me 4 hours to render at 320x256
(tip:when rendering an animation make sure to turn off screen saver and just shut the monitor. the screen saver will screw up the process.)
my opinion is that the blender user community is still less “professional”. don’t want to offend anyone, but this seems to be the truth. consider the fact that most users of other software, be it A:M, LW or Maya have a different background (work in studios, film-houses etc.). because of it’s (free) nature, blender has probably the youngest user base and only few people who are really aiming towards professional animation. but, as with all other things, this is subject to change, and as blender evolves, the ppl using blender evolve and thus the art created with blender gets better and better. it’s merely a matter of time when we’ll see some mind-blowing animations made with blender.
but in the end, it’s the talent and work that counts, the software is secondary.
Thankyou for your replys.
I am so glad I ditched Anim8or for Blender.
Perhaps with time I will be able to create some good animations with Blender- I certainly have ideas. All I needs now is the will to learn how to put the ideas into Blender- and I have that too.
Once again, thankyou for responding to my noobish question.
a tip for character animation. if the character is high poly move the armature setup to another layer. but make sure they’re parented and that when rendering or animating u have both layers selected it speeds up the posing process
Wow, I didn’t know that. That’ll make things a lot easier for me.
Thanks for the tip.
dont worry if u dont see the deformation in realtime it will show up in anim/render
Hi !
I think that the master key word is RENDERING TIME .
Now,I am typing on my old laptop ,because my main computer (Pentium 4 -2GHz- 1.5MB RAM) is busy for at least 1O days,for the rendering of a 2500 frames PAL sequence in 720x576. With OSA 16,Raytracing and a few Ambient Occlusion…
Each frame takes between 3 and 9 minutes.The longest time is when a glass objet is in the camera field.
I’m using the Antares fast render for Intel processors.
1O days or even more for a 100 seconds animation… And I can only wait,without working on the followings steps oft he project,because I have only one computer that is able to run Blender.
The short 15 seconds sample that you can see on my Website (page -6) has taken 20 hours of rendering!
Making an animation doesn’t needs only working time,but also very long rendering time. Not every body can buy several computers…
High quality videofiles takes also a huge space on web servers,and for example, I have a 1OOMB space on the server,but my web provider doesn’t allow the uploading of files weighing more than 4MB each !
Users that have these limits can’t show long animations,even if they want!
Philippe.
are there any fast render thingys for amd athlon processors
More amd athlon processors. 
crap
imo amd is better
Well, if you are looking for hardware accelerated computation, there are some options but I don’t think Blender supports them. But more computers is better. I usually use my friends computers overnight to render complex animations. That has proven itself sucessful.
But really, the best thing you can do for your AMD processor to increase the speed of a render is to not use windows, render it in Linux. I rendered the same scene and by the time my windows machine finished frame 15 my linux was already on frame 18. So theres one way to do it. RAM also helps. On the User Preferences Header you can see how much Mem Blender is taking up. That’s a good indicator to let you know how much ram it’s taking.
But really, more is better. That’s the main solution. So, get your friends to help you render.
A render farm. Hook up a load of PCs and make them share the work Although I dunno how you’d do that.
You could probably get each one to render a certain frame, then the next:
PC 1 2 3 | 1 2 3 etc
Frame 1 2 3 | 4 5 6 etc
Yeah, I’m bored.
Antares speedy render build works on most amd cpu’s also.
there was a on line renderfarm offering free time for small projects … link somewhere on this board…
Yes… I saw this render farm site. It is free for small projects (less than 2 hours rendering, if I remember well),but when we need a render farm, it is generally for very huge projects. In a previous mail I said that I was working on a project that needs at least 1O days of rendering. Yesterday I have changed some textures and modified some glass objects that need raytracing,and my new estimated time is 25 days on a P4 2GHz with 1.5 GB of RAM, for 1 min 40 in Pal quality. It would be very expensive in a render farm! Money would be better enployed in purchasing a computer !
I have checked almost all the distributions of Linux on my computer,and Blender is faster with Windows XP!
I hope to be able to buy a second computer next month,and perhaps another next year…
Philippe.