3D Animation

I need some help!

My initial intent was to learn how to make some animations for my grand kids that would tell some of my stories like the one about a bluebird and a fox, some kids that find lost pirate treasure, or even the more ambitious story entitled “The Mouse House Caper”! Perhaps I am naive but for certain I was uneducated about “computer based animation”. Nonetheless, I ventured out into the online world to find out what I didn’t know but needed to know about “animation”. So far, it has been a wonderful and exciting journey. At 69 years old I have finally discovered what I want to do when I grow up! However I still feel a bit lost and unsure how to move forward. That is what I would like to know – what is a viable pathway to travel down the road to 3D animation competence! To that end I’d like to ask for your advice and experience hoping that will help me map out my “animation travel plans”!

Perhaps a broad, but brief review, of where I have been so far may be helpful to considering a recommendation of where I should go next. I’ll also list a few constraints that impact my 3d animation travel plans. Hence, here are some points for context:

1. I cannot afford expensive software platforms. That includes software such as any Adobe products (or any “subscription” type products for that matter), AutoDesk Maya, or anything that cost more than $1000.

2. I will work on a laptop. My current plan is an HP Omen Laptop, (16.1” screen, I-7 Intel CPU, NVIDIA RTX 3060 GPU, 32 GB ram, 1 TB SSD).

3. I am not inclined to pay for basic tutorials as they seem to be a “pig in a poke” situation. That said, however, I have kissed many, many YouTube “frogs” looking for the rare tutorial “prince”! It has been exceedingly tiresome and seemingly never ending search sometimes!

4. I have studied the history of animation including the twelve principles, etc.

4. I researched, done the tutorials, and worked on trial versions from a variety of different animation software platforms including the following:

A. Reallusion Cartoon Animator (2D animation)

B. Reallusion Character Creator 3 (3D Characters)

C. Reallusion Iclone 7

D. DAZ3D Studio

E. Epic Games Unreal Engine

5. I am currently “hip deep” in learning Unreal Engine and find it very powerful but I also find it ….

A. Exceedingly complicated but viable

B. Very, very game construction oriented,

C. An unintuitive GUI arrangement – unobvious to me on how to insert a character into a scene!

D. The tutorials are a strange mix of both very good and very bad teaching presentations,

E. Epic Games has some excellent animator development initiatives such as metahumans (genuinely exquisite photo realistic characters), a 30 day “fellowship”, and a recent symposium for telling stories with unreal engine to name a few)!

At this stage of my 3d animation journey my simple mind finds that “computer based animation” has the following major production components!

1. Character construction and development (modeling, rigging, texturizing)

2. Environment and/or scene construction

3. Integration of characters into an environment (movements, expressions, props, dialogue, sounds)

4. Rendering

5. Compositing

6. Final touches

My simple mind also believes that the proverbial “pipeline” notion in 3D animation means that there is no one software that can handle all 6 components of the process. The trouble I have is that I do not know which software will easily fit together to make a strong “flow” of 3D product or even more importantly which software is best suited for which 3D production components.

Today I am frustrated, disheartened, and rudderless about what compass heading I should be sailing to get back on my 3D Animation proficiency journey. Any advice that may get me back on course?    

I, like you have been on this journey also a long time and have gone in many different directions. I would say you definitely have the knowledge to go forward, but to simplify, from what I read above, my suggestion would be first reverse back to simplicity, don’t create your own models but use what others have created since all rigging is there. No need to reinvent….next ask Jay….he is a great teacher in animation….click her to his YouTube channel for free about animation using the free software Daz Studio… https://www.youtube.com/c/TheWPGuru/search?query=animation

your computer is plenty good to do what you need in my opinion. I think the cost of models would be cheaper then purchasing software to create your own characters, and there are so many to use and adapt to what you need.  I hope I understand your question and hope this helps. Let me know.

Tangential, if your lap-top will drive and 'extend onto' a second screen, do so. The extra work-space is so helpful, especially if you have, like me, 'Post Middle-Aged Eyes'...

Also, if you can co-opt an older / dormant PC as an external, CPU-only queue render box, you could do scene set-ups and quick test-renders on lap-top, then toss full jobs across your local network to the remote 'Box'...

(One frame at a time...)

there's no reason you can't animate in layers. I find that easier than trying to do it all in Daz or Unreal, use them both for their strengths. For example, animate your characters in Daz, and animate your backgrounds In Unreal. Combine your layers in whatever NLE system you want, Blender can even do basic video editing now. Think of it as using a virtual "green screen". It saves a lot of time with rendering, and you get the best of both worlds.

well I use Unreal and iClone 6 as well as DAZ software with just a Ryzen3 and a 980Ti, so it's not hardware that is the issue, look at and follow the threads in the DAZ Unreal plugin forum, watch lots of YouTube tutorials on using Unreal Engine, I recommend https://www.youtube.com/c/MattAspland iC7 there are lots of YouTube tutorials too and the pipeline seems considerably easier than what I do using iC6 and 3DX6 😋, I also composite a lot in Hitfilm Express which is free.

If money is any concern at all, imo you should get into Blender. Blender is super powerful and feature-heavy these days, I'm a long time Cinema 4D user but if I was getting into 3d from scratch I would definitely start with Blender instead. Especially as a solo content creator it is a massive drain on your time, money and mental capacity to try to learn a big spectrum of different apps, and Blender can do pretty much everything. Even when I had a lot of money and could afford to buy a bunch of different apps it was always a massive road block to learn the UI and special mindset for wildly different apps like Zbrush, Maya and others, each of them is a massive money investment and specialized skillset in their own right and it's just not practical for a lot of people to work with more than one or two. Unreal Engine is another massive skillset all of its own! Interchanging data between these apps is also frequently a big pain that requires a lot of trial and error!

if your goal is to make hobbyist level animations then my advice is get into a multi purpose content creation app like Blender and you will bypass a tremendous amount of learning just because of having a single unified UI and set of keystrokes for common tasks, and you generally won't have to deal with import/export problems either.