Hello everyone! I’m jimmie and I’m learning movie creation in university, in Japan.
I really want to make cool fighting animation, just like RWBY fight by Monty Oum.
It would be very helpful if you guys could give me some advice.
I want to ask that, I have never experienced any 3D software before,
if I going to focus in only learning and making “character fighting sequence” in 1 year,
is Blender (or including addons) good enough for me,
or I better buy some another tools specifically for character animation, like iClone?
or choose the other software like Maya?
Actually I’m little flustered because I need to make a fight sequence demo for a upcoming project before the end of this year, a wrong choise may cause more waste of time so…
I’ve been do a lot of research in internet, but there’s no many thread or blog are talking about character animation by blender.
I know Maya is a very good choise for it, but I’m still a student, Maya is expensive for me.
And I gonna use some free MMD character model for practicing, so modeling and rigging may not be the main problem.
Please forgive my poor English, and I looking forward to hearing from you guys. Thank you for your time!
edit: thanks for reply, I know that use blender to create great animation is totally possible, but now I just have no many many years of times to spend on it. I already have the sequence, shot, storyboard of the fighting demo I need to make inside my brain, all I need may be a efficient way to make the output.
I’m considering with Blender / iClone / Maya, or the other, which one could be fastest to learn in 1 year, and easist to use, specifically in creating character animation. Thank you!
Blender is perfectly capable of pulling off an animated fight scene, or any animated scene. What it really comes down to is your own personal skill level, in animation and the tools blender has to offer.
While Maya is powerful in terms of rigging & animation especially after the past updates
but Blender is capable too, it might not have all the bells & whistles but u get good results if you have the skills for it.
I think my biggest issue with Blender are.
1 - it doesn’t have many great rigs like Maya which are more fun and easy to use.
2 - the Workflow in Blender is not really Animator friendly as you have to rely on hotkeys most of the time also the 3D Manipulators are not as polished.
3 - Performance could be an issue if you have complex rigs.
that’s why i got Maya student version which u too can get for learning, but if you are going to make your own Characters, rig them and Animate i would say use Blender as doing those in maya will take you more time than you think.
For me if Blender improve it’s rigging and animation tools to be in the level of Maya then it’ll be the best 3D Animation Software out there.
I keep hearing this, but I still want to see a rigger that’s really knows Blender rigging tools and Maya rigging tools to explain the differences and limitations present in Blender that are not present in Maya.
Not a criticism to your opinion, but a real requirement about that, I never saw a pro efficient rigger in both software to speak about it.
Well i do mostly Animation but i can tell how good a rig is from using it,most Maya rigs out there are really well done in comparsion to the ones in Blender and makes learning Animation more fun.
I once asked Jason Schleifer about that & he told me that Maya is more versatile, capable under the hood and provides granular control for Riggers & TDs, probably that’s why Blender had to do a whole rewrite of the dependancy graph, plans for node based rigging,animation layers, better skinning algorithm…and of course the most important one is performance with complex rigs, as of today Blender is way far back in this area.
He is probably the guy who can answer this question better than anyone else as he is pro in both Software and had done lots of professional rigging projects
Note: here is someone else who I follow and has experience in both Maya & blender who has made a post about what could be improved in the future Animation 2020 project.
The first season of RWBY was produced in Poser, which Monty was a master of. „Next Gen“ Was made in Blender and also featured a number of fighting scenes.
I worked on the software of both, and as much as I would like to take credit, it’s not the Software that’s „good enough“. It’s the animators who make good fighting scenes, and animating is hard.
Short answer: Any program is fine. Pick one and start animating. The principles of good animation are the same in any software.
Regarding rigging, it all depends, it’s not the same a right for a feature film that animates 4 seconds per week with super specific and complex rigs, than a rig for a short film than a rig for tv ad.
In the two latest cases something like AutoRig Pro is more than enough, it’s quite advance, comfortable to animate and keeps being improved.
In tv ads we don’t have too much time for rigging, so something quick and effective is what it’s needed, when we use to work with max, CAT or Biped were the chosen tools, both are worse than ARP for example
But I fundamentally agree, it’s more important the animator than the rig, of course a super bad rig is useless,but we are not talking about that case
In all my testing, I haven’t seen that complexity of rigs has anything to do with performance, only vert count of the deformed model. (But Blender’s armature modifier is really disgustingly slow.) Drivers are probably an exception, and I haven’t tested them. Can you show me an example of two rigs where you get significantly different performance on the same mesh? Is it just drivers that you’re talking about?
There’re no two complex rigs with the same mesh, u have to do that yourself and build both rigs.
I have used some Maya realistic rigs so if you’re talking about complexity it’s both the polycount & the rig setup, but i have yet to see one in Blender, most Blender rigs out there are cartoony stuff so it’s hard to do 1 to 1 comparison.
