Interested in Freelancer and Studio Animation with Blender

Support Animation and Rigging
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I work with several freelancers and a couple of studios that have been trying Blender 2.8 for animation.
Comments have been all over the board from “We are going back to Maya” to Blender is OK. Biggest complaints stem from the the Timeline to the rigging. For the timeline, the change to a very small area to scrub in has been seen as a minus and disincentive to use Blender because rather than just click and scroll in a large area, you now have to be very careful that you don’t accidentally move keyframes. What a time waster. Selecting multiple rigs while animating and switching back and forth in pose mode. (Yeah I know you can select them both in object mode and then go to pose mode. Not very intuitive though and poorly documented or shown in the interface.) Unable to click in the VSE and move the frame marker again related to the smallness of the area. (Maybe the area for the timeline scubbing can be made variable?) For rigging, the path using legacy rigs such as rigify scripts not working on old rigs has been a chore. Do we rerig in Blender or do we switch to another software?
Animation bone selection has been iffy. Sometimes you can select a bone, sometimes you can not. Seems intermittent but a big source of frustration. Bones not staying where you keyframe (again an intermittent issue where they revert back to prior position even with a keyframe.)

There are other smaller issues but for me, I’m hoping we will work these out. Sometimes I feel that in the pursuit of “industry standard” the meaning is I want it to look like Maya or 3dMax. Hmmm? Why?

I would be most interested in others comments on animaton with the new Blender 2.8.

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Yes, I agree, there quite a few things which are not as convenient as in most other packages.

The timeline with the playhead scrubbing I got used to, after some time I find selecting and copying keys easier than in maya for example. I guess it’s a tradeoff, one of those things that could be up for majority vote (there might be a way to change it, not sure, I like sticking to defaults if possible).

I got used to bone selection as well, anything other than octahedral works ok-ish most times. The pose-edit mode thing is something that I prefer in hindsight.

Things I’m not a big fan of is an overly complicated way of setting up drivers (once you’re there it’s quite powerful though) in comparison to set driven keys in maya. IK/FK could be a tad more simplified as well, the whole bone layers and using multiple armatures thing is confusing for most people coming from different packages.

Things that’d need a lot more attention are retargeting and nla, those are just not up to par with the competition. I’m guessing animation 2020 will solve a lot of these issues.

One of the biggest things for studios though would be the complete absence of a node based scene assembly tool - with Clarisse builder or Katana being industry standard I don’t see big productions having an easy time using Blender for bigger projects.

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