I need to learn other software than Blender any suggestions for animation?

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My daily workflow: Walk to my desk, open PC, open Blender, use Blender, Blender doesn’t allow me to get anything done, close PC. Look for help online while I contemplate my existence.

Ask me to design a character from scratch and have it rigged and ready to animate in Blender, make any kind of prop. Never had any problems, at least a much lower percentage of bugs causing errors but never as frequent as this.

Got another bug again last night, this time the Shape key value didn’t want to keyframe, Blender is just unusable, it’s not parabole, and it takes me all day to find a bug and the rest of the day is to recover.

I rendered zero frames for the whole month.

The solution was: Select everything from my scene copy and paste it to a new Blender file. Now shape keys can be keyframed again.

I found a way to keep me from crying in agony from mental torture.

I decided to search for something else to animate my 3D characters with.

I learned 3D using Maya, but I don’t have the… how many thousands?

iClone, I used it before and a massive bug involving keyframes adding and disappearing was a massive bug and all I could do is twittle my thumbs as I was dependent on the software to work on the project. Importing characters and adding your own assets is intentionally clunky as it’s meant for those who wants to buy assets like stuff from DAZ studio and mocaps.

Unreal is designed for ultra realistic scenery and designed to be used online at all times. Seems daunting.

Akeytsu looks like a slick workflow but haven’t tried it yet.

Unity might have some potential. It’s meant to make games with but also cutscenes which would do nicely.

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nonsense… utterly gratuitous assertion.

I use Blender with Iclone and daz figures.

I have even began to use other characters that I rigged with the auto-rig pro add-on.

If you cant afford Autodesk Maya or Max then you will have a difficult task finding any other options for quality Character animation.

You can buy the vestigial
Lightwave3D for $995 USD
https://www.newtek.com/lightwave/2020/

There is the garbage/kiddie toy poser application
https://www.posersoftware.com/

BTW Unreal can run offline its the metahuman chracter tool that is web based

and Unity has some great Character animation tools you Might consider.

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“nonsense… utterly gratuitous assertion.”

You think I just come here because I am bored, Blender is giving me grief and I don’t have a clue how to fix it. I don’t enjoy coming here just to fill these nice helpful people with my annoyance? I’d rather be making fun animation. I would not even be back here but I was on my way to report that said bug I got last night.

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I’m gonna go back to 2.93.9 Maybe I’ll get less bugs that way?

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“giving me grief” is not a particularly useful description of your problem.

It would seem you solved your shape key animation issue, so what else is happening?

At any rate no software is without its legitimate “bugs”
However one has to consider what one has PAID for the software.

You asked about alternatives for Character animation in your thread title.
I gave you some.

I suggest trying them out, or at least visiting their online user communities to see if any of them would better serve your needs.

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One of my friends who complains about Blender is constantly bringing Source Filmmaker as better alternative. Well, “better” in the way that it has good character rigging and animation tools, but not much of everything else (like rendering).

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Nearly forgot about the SFM

indeed a great Character animation tool with feature film quality lipsync.

However you are limited to the “cartoon” style of the characters
or enduring the vicissitudes of rigging your own ,(which I am given to understand requires the use of Blender or Maya).

And yes the renders all look the same with flat shading and very little in the way of visual effects

But if the OP prefers Toon style renders and Characters then yes , add the SFM to the list of alternatives to Blender for Character animation.

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Blender should have premade SFM rigs available, or even automated add-ons, at this point. Of course rigging will be hurdle, but so is using Unity/UE (if you plan to make animations exclusively in them)

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It depends on the kind of bug you’re having…
Sadly, latest blender tend to be the most stable versions.

Unless you’re having issue with something that just been changed it’s likely that if the bug is fixed in 2.9 it will be in 3.2 / 3.3…

In general 3D animation projects aren’t a smooth ride, you always encounter strange bugs.
Sometime I spend half of my time on a project looking into random issues. Or things that “should” work but for some reasons they don’t…
When I’m lucky it’s more of a 20/30% ratio of issues. But that’s how 3D animation works, on every software.

It’s quite frustrating, but when you think about it, 3D software are huge monsters full of functionalities, 3D in general is technical and complex, it’s obvious that something will go wrong at some point.
It’s basically the same with other DCC, maya, 3ds are full of issue and every complex project reveal them.

Of course, you can probably model a character or a set in each software without having problems, but put them both in a scene, plan to animate things and you add a layer of complexity, and you get way more chances to get in trouble. and once you’ve got several shots to manage, it’s another layer of complexity and chances that you’re having problems grows exponentially.

You can probably use simpler software, because they are simple you may have less issues, but you’ll probably end up being limited. Think like sketchup for modeling, simple and efficient but very limited.

My advice is to accept things as they are, making your own animation short/series/movie is a huge task, a lot of problems are obvious like managing the workload, writing a good story, technical issues are part of the equation. You should also learn to troubleshot scenes, and make things work.
You may spend some days on some technical issues, just like you may spend days fixing a story.

It’s not blender’s fault, many studios start using it, they do it for a reason, it’s a better investment that Maya or 3ds for them. If it wasn’t the case and blender was full of bugs, they’ll go back to maya right away.

Sorry if that may sound a bit harsh …

Good luck and I hope you’ll manage to get the motivation back !

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@DeckardX08
If there is a great demand for SFM ready Blender rigs then people would produce them for the various Blender markets

.

From my casual observation, the SFM Ecosystem seems a bit of “Walled garden”

That said, they do have “sharing site” for SFM native rig and props

but frankly alot of it appears to be

Blatant Game ripped models.

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I was mostly speculating, since SFM seemed to be the popular program for me. Havent actually done much research

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I agree Blender makes beautiful renders. And I always wanted to learn all the aspects of Blender to use that quality with my animations.

Since June 1st, I want to make a scene where our hero runs and dives into a floor trap, we see our hero smile as she falls in, in slow motion showing that this is a good thing.

This is what I want to do for the last month, that one scene. I discovered the most difficult aspects to do with Blender is retargeting and transferring animation data. Not difficult to execute just difficult for Blender to accomplish.

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“giving me grief” is not a particularly useful description of your problem.

I wasn’t trying to be useful just stating how I felt about Blender.

I spoke too soon it kept doing it again soon after. I told them that doing a simple scene with a block and a shape key worked as it should it did not reveal the bug. My rigged character however doesn’t work.

So I decided to go without Time Stretching. and find some other way to slow mo by doing everything manually.

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You need to make friends with other animators who use Blender daily with equally as complex tasks (or even more complex) who never encounter these issues, or even better - have encountered every issue you will ever encounter hundreds of times and can identify the problem and tell you the fix within 30 seconds.

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I’d kill for that kind of support but I know only people who work with Maya. So I come here hope for some help, sometimes, I try Blender stack exchange.

CGDive did provide me with some help as he was curious about my failure recreating one of his tutorials. I told him I was very grateful for his help. That time I missed a step.

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Some people who worked on Maya and the Three and Next Gen have created an animation course recently. I suggest joining the community of students who are taking that course as a first place to make friends and then keep asking around. You need to actually make friends as in you can email/call/text them directly at any hour of the day or night with an animation problem and expect a high-effort answer within 12 hours.

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I can’t afford to pay thousands to Maya.

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I didn’t say anything about Maya, the software. :confused:

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“people who worked on Maya”

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“Maya and the Three” is a show on Netflix made with Blender.

People who worked on the show, in Blender, made an animation course:

They have 526 students and a forum. If 50 of those students are near/above your skill level, and if you can make good friends with 10 of them, you could have a round-the-clock team of people who find news of your animations bugs very interesting and are highly motivated to look into your issues because they can clearly imagine how pissed they would be if they encountered the same issue a year from now on a tight project.

I have also heard great things about this course:

but I don’t know if they have any kind of community congregating location and I don’t know how many recent students it has.

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