A Nerd Needs Tips In Animating

[Ibro156]

Guys, am student at College. I do game design, am currently a year one student and wanted to get into animating. Currently am best at coding in my year, but utterly useless at drawing and 3D modeling. I want to get into animating, seeing it would be fun for me. Got any tips for a newbie? :)

Edited January 21, 2016 by Ibro156

[(XBOX)Gray Silhouette]

As an animator myself, I highly recommend Blender.

It's free and easy. Have some cash you want to spend? Then get Maya.

And then? Youtube. I have learned a LOT from youtube. Another helpful thing is simply playing around in the program. Just pushing buttons to see what they do, etc.

Doing animation without rigging is...odd, to me. I guess i'm alone in wanting to do the entire process of modeling/rigging/animating by myself, but I feel it makes the end result easier to work with. If you know how to model good topology, you get easier and better rigs. If you make your own rigs, it's easier to control them and fix them if their is an error. Knowing how to do both of those things can make the animation a lot smoother and easier for you.

I wish you luck in this.

[RagingGrizzly]

Download Blender and Unreal engine 4.

 

Watch Tutorials.

[JakeyPrime]

Hey there!

 

I wouldn't suggest this in the players helping players forum, as this isn't relating to Warframe a whole lot. Since you say you're awful at modeling and drawing. I would suggest finding assets and animating from there. Cinema4D is pretty good for starters, but it's not super cheap. Maya is great for modeling. I personally use Unreal Engine 4 for animation, even though it's a game engine. But it's free now, and it comes with a few animation demos that you can check out and teach yourself with. That's what I did. Hope this helps!

[MichelPostma]

Go download Tennogen and discover you hidden talents to get into the business in warframe style.

If you do a good job, you may even earn yourself some cash

[jonnin]

animation used to be (ive been out of the loop for a few years) a 3 person job.

person 1 makes the models look good, standalone.

person 2 puts 'hinges' (for lack of a better word) on the model so it can bend in the right places -- this is oversimplification as that means grouping parts together and defining ranges of movement and more.

person 3 animates it by adding scripts of positions (generally, you put it in start and end poses and let it move between them using its pre-defined range of movement limitations etc).

 

Its rare for one person to do all that, but its possible.   Means mastering more skills and tools, though.  

 

There are free packages you can use to learn the craft.   I don't even know what the pros use these days ... again, its been a while.