A beginner asking advice on animations......

[ernie90125]

To the more expreienced animators....

For a while now I have been encouraging skilled animators to continue to create and publish BSG fanfilms. It's not something I have considered doing before myself, as I accept I have not artistic ability. Even my matchstick men look deformed.

However....presumably it shouldn't be beyond someone's capablity to take existing models....a starry background...add some motion and see a viper fly past ? Not doubt becoming more complex and details as skills allow....

Could the more experiences animators here advise, not just for myself but all potentially interested people, which are the best programs and models etc ? Compare and contrast etc.....

[rjandron]

It's not so much the software as the animator that counts in creating animations. A good animator brings a set of skills to any animation package which can ensure that the final animation is as good as it can get.

Whether the person uses Cinema4D, Lightwave, Max, Electric Image, Softimage, Hash, Truespace, Blender, or Maya is really only relevant from a production standpoint. Whatever package an animator chooses ought to be well supported in terms of company strength and plugins, as well as being able to import and export a wide array of model formats for animation. All of these software packages that I have mentioned have been involved in film production in one way or another--some have longer pedigrees than others, so they will all serve an animator well.

So, which is best? It depends. It depends on how much you want to spend on the software--both in terms of dollars and time and on what other resources you have. If you have no interest in modelling or converting meshes, then you'll want a program that is common to the meshes that you can access so that you can start animating right away. If you are running an operating system other than Windows, then some programs will not be available to you.

My choice is Lightwave. It has good support, a wide user base, a good selection of plugins with the software and from third parties, and there are a lot of models available for it. It also has Windows and Mac versions. Its asset management isn't the best, unfortunately, and getting it to play nicely with compositing software (a whole other area) can be fiddly. Pricing is on the high to mid-range.

Overall, it's an excellent program for the type of animation I'm doing and it has enough depth to enable me to create some very interesting animations.

[NE0]

A thing that I notice with new series, is that they do a really good job of showing the centrifugal force. When a Viper turns on its axis, it still continues to move in the orginal direction. This is very true in a vacuum enivorment. A good way to learn on how to animate things is to watch a lot of videos of something related to the model that you are animating (in most cases aircrafts), then watch it frame by frame of in slow motion to get an idea on what you should be seeing when you animate something.

[billy-home]

They did the same thing in Babylon 5 with the Fury's, they used the thrusters to spin around while continuing in the same direction, a very nice effect.. I also use Lightwave, for the same reasons rjandron stated, though my animation skills need to be worked on quite a bit

[buckymsr]

The most important thing in animation is to bear in mind, that in 90% of the time we animate we recreate real world physics. So use reference material as often as you can. Be it in aircraft clips, etc. ...

The software takes a secondary role to that.