Unity for 3D animations?

Hi!

I'm kind of new in the Unity community and while I know Unity is a great game engine but... I'm wondering about trying my claws on something else too and I don't quite have much experience on this yet.. so...

I've already seen some of these really awesome short films around... like

or...

...but of course as a game engine.,. most of the resources I find around are about making games. Are there any more people involved in creating these type of animations other than the official Unity team and if so how does Unity fare on this aspect?

Are there any communities devoted to making similar animations with the help of Unity? Or... Are there just better, easier to use solutions and Unity just stays as a game engine and other than some ingame cutscenes there's not much else going about CGI animations?

 

Right tool for the right job. While Unity can make 3D animations, you might be better off using 3D animation software. Blender is free.

 

Are you asking about creating assets with Unity? Or using it as a rendering/playback engine?

 

I'm much more interested about rendering. I know Unity doesn't have as much tools for creating assets like Maya, Blender or any other 3D Modelling software out there but I guess one could consider using Unity for renders if per say it's easier to work with Shaders and stuffs.

Realtime rendering may be a thing - for low poly models that is - which would be awesome but I'm wondering if that's possible, what kind of experience people have with the software?

I'm pretty sure noone will change the lighting settings of a complete scene during render tho as it would require a small nuclear reactor in your garden to compute - but even if one could make realtime adjustments on certain aspects without completely rerendering the entire scene is nice.