Why are majority of Blender users only into still images and art and not into animation?

One point I didn’t see mentioned: audio. Sure, you could make it silent but that’s just not satisfying. And you could use a music generator to put in a looped background track, but its still short of what is expected. So now you’re up to background theme music, incidental music, sound effects, dialog and/or voice-over… and you’re now into a whole other field of work.

That also comes back to that whole “eat an elephant business”, where the user expects to do everything themselves, in-house, with consumer hardware. There’s a reason why even animated shorts have a long list of contributors.

2 Likes

I for one, have always been the type to think “Why should I work so hard on a 3d model if all it’s going to be used for is a single render? I at least want to use it for animation or games!”
This is why I also don’t really like sculpting. I prefer to go straight to vertex by vertex modeling. That way I can go start rigging/texturing all that stuff immediately after.
But I’ve come to enjoy doing single rendered art though, It’s still important to learn compositing camera work and other things for single renders. And I’m able to create visuals that just might not be possible with hand drawn work and vice versa.
But with Eevee on the horizon, I know their is going to be a lot more animation coming out of the community.

3 Likes

Killer Bean Forever is a good example. The movie made by one person but for the audio help of others was sought so the music was done by two persons and voice over-dialogue by four.

Animations are time consuming for sure, which is the main reason you don’t see too many (also in recent years monetizing them has proven difficult, I.E. youtube algorithms). I’ll take this opportunity to plug myself, I do animations on youtube.

Looking forward to Eevee, since that will surely make the turnaround time faster.

3 Likes

I made these 9 years ago and although it was a lot of fun I had to pretty much give up. I still have to fight the urge to create stuff, as for me it would just toiling away as an unknown be adding to the ruthless ludicrously monetized “idea farm” that is the internet. At the time Adsense was very frustrating, it would get to the point of a payout, and then suddenly would reduce below the payout threshold, which was my repeated 10 year looping experience with adsense until they finally strangely closed it for failure to payout anything a few weeks ago. So after that I have no initiative to even think about testing weird new kickfunder avenues that seem to work for some. The graphics expectations are much higher than ten years ago too, I was 20 when playstation debuted so I have strange viewpoint of quality, but I no longer have a graphics card for modern rendering ala blender 2.8. I have 8 core I7, but I think very very soon that will be just a piece of junk antique.
Also, if I understand correctly it’s frowned upon for individuals to animate, as each individual job has been broken down into a european style guild -like structure, where one person does all the texturing and nothing else, another person does the rigging, and then hands it off to a person who only animates, etc…I had to totally throw out everything from my page except for modelling examples because of this, to give the correct impression of the singular type non organic modelling work I seek.



2 Likes

Because it’s much harder, duh. You think one still image is tough, try making 10,000. The percentage of people doing animations compared to those making stills is going to be low regardless of the software.

1 Like

Basically, you ask why the photographers don’t make movies. It’s just a completely different domain that require more time, more skill and for real production value, a (bigger) budget and a team.

4 Likes

I woundn’t worry about it one way or the other. Don’t look at what other people are doing with software for inspiration as to what you might be able to do. There are enough great artists using Blender to make animated movies show you that if you apply yourself, you can learn animation skills and all of the other skills you need to know.

It does take time. A lot of time. And it does take a lot of dedication. But you can do it. Just take one small thing at a time and master it.

1 Like

It’s not just more images.

If you want a truly complete animation, then you often have to also deal with sequence editing and the insertion of music and sound effects.

While the Blender sequence editor might be suitable for doing basic editing for no cost, good quality DAW software for audio simply cannot be found in the world of Open Source (LMMS is a bit limited last I looked at it and Audacity is more of an editor for existing sound files).

1 Like

haha… I guess I don’t belong to the majority…

edit: …but I agree with what has been written so far within this topic. Animations can be quite demanding to deal with. In the clip which I’ve shared I even went to turboSquid to help cut down on modelling and texturing time (I purchased boots and a bow-tie-thing which I didn’t wanna spend any time on modelling myself).

1 Like

To be sure… there is a grand-canyon-wide uncanny valley you will have to traverse with 3D. Usually when 3D animation is bad, it is really really really bad on many levels.

The way to scale that valley is you have to master a 1000 different little things. And avoid 1000 others that are best left unexplored because they will lead you down into the valley where you will be stuck forever.

For some reason, and I don’t know why this is, 2D animation is far more forgiving.

It’s a kind of question like why is there more specific domain specialists (archvis specialists, game modelers etc.) than expert generalists. 3D CGI is such a vast pool of knowledge that not many people find time and possibilities to excell in many of it’s alleys.
And making an animation is both knowledge and hardware/software consuming.
That’s why big things are done by teams.

Also the resources for rendering are an issue here. That is exactly a place where services of renderfarms have most usage and benefits for the pipeline.

But in fact the number of good animations done in blender increases. Just to mention “Next Gen” .
Or a wonderful short animation “The Box” - it was posted on BA some time ago.

And a whole new thing coming to blender 2.8 - the grease pencil and it’s awesome possibilities for 2d animators to go crazy with 3D.
The future looks bright…

Jarek D (DJ)

1 Like

I’m using blender for making effects and animations for our documentaries. Here’s one of them. Here and there there are text-effects, small animations and the tower of babel as you can see behind me in the screenshot. :slight_smile:

1 Like