What is te best animation software out there for CGI?

I am a business programmer with some experience in game development. I have recently decided to try my hand at CGI animation as well, and ran across your excellent forum today.

Funding is not a concern per-se, wen considering my question.

I latched onto a thread here comparing Bender to Maya, and their export/import capabilities. I I have also run across other programs out there like lightwave and renderman.

My concern is that i will waste valuable time learning the ins and outs of something (like Bender) only to find it does not produce video quality scenes. I am going through some of the Bender tutorials now, and downloading a maya trial.

So what is the bottom line if I want to make a CGI film? I plan on starting off on a XPS quad core, and have 5 or 6 other computers laying around.

What should I buy, in the opinion of those on the board, to get quality models and scenes?

And, knowing that I will need others on my team, are people using freeware like bender to produce cetain aspects of a scene, then importing them? What's the norm? If I spend a few months learning Bender, will I be unable to export the stuff into a faster renderer later? Perhaps I should have used something different to begin with, if thats the case?


Does anyone know what Final Fantasy 7 advent was based on? Or the last 2 appleseeds?

Any help is appreciated. It is hard to make a decision when I am new to the field. I assume many have already gone down this road, I appreciate any feedback. Perhaps I can avoid one mistake, by starting off with the right software.

Thanks

Paul
Eldemar@Aol.com

 

I think Blender is perfectly capable right now for good CGI animation. As allways, it is the artist, not the tool... Take a look there:

http://www.blender.org/features-gallery/gallery/art-gallery/

or there

http://www.bigbuckbunny.org/

You will get much more info at the Blender artist forums:

http://blenderartists.org/forum/

 

As a beginner you might also want to ask yourself: how easy is it to find quality learning materials for the cgi package in question?

The quantity of such material for Maya, for instance, is simply staggering.

 

Hi all - thanks for the posts and PMs on this topic.

I am learning on Blender for now, and will look into XSI 7 down the road.

It seems like there are a ton of add on things that are needed, so the answer of "whats the best" is a pretty varied one.

I haven't figured out if models from DAZ work with blender or XSI 7, but the models there look real nice.


Happy long weekend all

 

Blender is crashy and alien but a lot of people love it. I like Maya, but I probably wouldn't be using it today if I had cleaner and less expensive alternatives like Cheetah back when I started, since the learning curve was so intense. XSI is pretty nice too.

I'd recommend Cheetah myself-- get the least interface between you and your work as possible so you can focus on the important part. Wallace and Gromit are low-tech lumps of clay being artfully manipulated by an expert storyteller..

 

Blender is extremely stable; I don't think it's crashed once in the years I've been using it.

--Eric

 

I would recommend trying to get as many of the free learning editions as possible and spend a short time with each one. Every program has its own quirks and I think its important to try a few to find one that suits your mind set. You'll progress much more quickly if, especially as a programmer, you feel comfortable with the logic used by the guys who wrote the software.

There is a massive gap in the approaches taken by Blender versus say Houdini (my own personal favourite tool)
I can't get anywhere learning Blender but Houdini I picked up in a few days. Many people say they find Houdini tough to learn, but others find the opposite its all down to the way you think about software in the first place I think.

Houdini now runs on Mac and exports to Fbx which makes it rather handy for working with Unity. Its also highly procedural and matches unity in that way too, in fact unity could learn a lot from it if they decide to go down a node based approach in the future for anything. Unity at the moment reminds me of Prisms which was the fore runner to Houdini.

 

Thar be no best matey, learn the fundamental concepts of 3d modeling first so that no matter what 3d package you use you will always know what to do.

 

I think Blender is the best.

When I was first deciding which software I wanted to use it was still debatable to me. It was between version 2.49 and the release of their Cycles render engine.

And now I am too busy using it not only for my personal but profesional use as well making video games.

The biggest reason why has to do with all the video tutorials out there. I hardly ever have to go on forums to ask questions cause I usually find the answers with google.

Sometimes in forums you ask a question and the answer has more to do with doing your own research more than it has to do with whether your question is an unusual concern. And I have found that I am too busy to learn everything available out there to teach you Blender.

This is just my opinion mind you and any software that you either find productive or enjoyable to use is probably the best.

 

Maya.

If funding isn't an issue I would advise you to use Maya. It's the industry standard and an extremely powerful tool aimed exactly what you are trying to achieve.

 

Since the OP asked for Advent Children here's some info

Also I can't confirm it (looked it up now, can't find anything, but I remember reading something back in the day), but I also think they used Lightwave for *something*

Also:

 

There is one issue you may want to take into consideration.

The original post says that you are a business programmer. If you know C/C++ then you should know that not only is Blender written is C/C++ and the default scripting language is Python but the source code is open.

So if you get curious as to how you may want to fork the program or you may even be bold enough to contribute for the sake of a commit credit, Blender is something you may want take a look at.