1) Probably the best 3D package is Autodesk Maya:?url? http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?id=6871843&siteID=123112?/url? or Autodesk 3D Studio(3DS) Max: ?url? http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?id=5659302&siteID=123112?/url?. Most professionals use Maya over 3DS Max; however, 3DS Max is really just as good. 3DS Max also has a much more friendly user interface and is in my opinion easier to learn. I would highly suggest that you purchase 3DS Max to learn on; however, since 3D modeling packages are so expensive you may want to just bite the bullet and buy Maya. I believe the main reason people pick either Maya or 3DS Max is because both of them perform better in different types of modeling. If I remember correctly Maya works best when doing NURB modeling and 3DS Max works best when doing polygonal modeling but both packages can handle both NURB and polygonal modeling. Defiantly check out the trial versions of both of these packages. You can get the 3DS Max trial at: ?url? http://nct.digitalriver.com/fulfill/0049.034?/url?. You can get the Maya trial called Maya Personal Learning Edition(PLE) at: ?url? http://www.alias.com/glb/eng/forms/maya_ple_form.jsp?/url?. The nice thing about Maya PLE is that it is pretty much the same thing as what you pay for except for free with the only restriction that you use it for personal use only. If I remember correctly Maya PLE doesn't even put watermarks on your renders.

2) As far as the audio I'm not really sure about that but it sounds like it would work.

Count on audio being a walk in the park if you're doing animation. If you have to learn the animation software, worry about that. Audio will come no problem.

By the way, how is learning the animation software in comparrison to learning avid or final cut (or video editing software)?

I haven't really done much animation but as far as learning how to model and then animate a model is far harder than learning movie editing programs, at least from my experience; however, I only really have used Premiere Pro 1.5. Learning to model has a huge learning curve as most of you probably know. My main advice is to just stick with it. Don't expect your first few models to look good, and make sure to start off with something easy. Go to the tutorial section of a site like 3dmaxer.dk (?url? http://www.3dmaxer.dk/tutorial.asp?ak=777&type=max?/url?) and find some easy tutorials at first like modeling a chair, and then move onto modeling a car, and then modeling a human, and then to texturing and lighting a scene and using particles for things like explosions. Typically 3D modeling UI's are pretty self explanatory and easy to navigate. Also, when animating things that are actually changing form like a human moving requires more work and attention to detail in the initial modeling process than models that will just move without changing shape such as a wood cylinder rolling. This is because most models are designed by making a mesh and you need to make sure that you have more detail around the joint areas so that when you texture it and then animate it you wont get your textures distorting when say the leg is bent. Also, in one of my Popular Science issues I read an article about how in a large Hollywood film production they need to make people vaporize and turn into dust. To do this it was going to require them to make models of all the actors who this would happen to and they were going to need to do models in high detail so they could do close up shots. Since this would cost a ton of money and require a lot of extra time they instead came up with a brilliant idea of taking an overhead projector and putting a transparency of a grid on it then putting the person they needed modeled in the path of the projection. Obviously the grid lines distorted around the persons body and so they took pictures of this and then imported it into a special program they made which was able to extract the grid and construct a mesh from it. They would than import it into the 3D modeling program they used (I believe it was Maya) and refined the surfaces and than animated it. I'll see if I can find the article online and I'll post a link to it if I can. I'm guessing you dont have the resources however to design a grid extracting program so I also found a really cool project someone made that uses a laser and than a program called Matlab to create a model. I've been hoping to try and make one and see what kind of results I can get. You can check it out here:?url? http://www.instructables.com/ex/i/8712E18AF6EF10279383000D61419BA3/?ALLSTEPS?/url?, someone made a more detailed guide which can be found at: ?url? http://n.ethz.ch/student/pleiness/en/index.php?/url?. Hope this helps.

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Originally posted by Black Armadillo

I haven't really done much animation but as far as learning how to model and then animate a model is far harder than learning movie editing programs, at least from my experience

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I don't doubt this is true, but when you mix in the costs and benefits of not dealing with actors/locations/schedules and other hassles/challenges of independent film the idea of animation starts to look pretty appealing none-the-less.

Side question, does anyone know exactly what they do on Robot Chicken? It looks like conventional stop-motion animation with blinking eyes and mouths added later but I'm starting to wonder if its more than that. It occured to me that perhaps they made 3-d models of action figures instead. It would be a lot quicker to animate once the models were done. It seems positively brilliant, high tech looking like low tech. Is there a program cheaper/easier than Maya that could handle that sort of simple animation?

RJSchwarz
San Diego, CA

Ahh sorry rjschwarz I was thinking more about learning the program itself, not really the whole movie making process with actors and locations and what not. As far as cheaper programs than Maya, there is a program called Softimage XSI; which, from what I gathered from their site is more for modelling characters. You can get whats called the foundation package for $495: ?url? http://www.softimage.com/products/xsi/pricing_and_packaging/foundation/default.aspx?/url?. Hope that helps.

Hey rjschwarz I just went over to the Robot Chicken website and they have a behind the scenes page there with two videos (?url? http://www.adultswim.com/shows/robotchicken/bts/?/url?). Gives a lot of great insight into the process of making a Robot Chicken episode. Go check it out if you haven't already.

Thanks a lot for the link.

I actually understood what you meant about the time training on the program. I was just trying to make a point about how hassles tend to balance out. Learn animation and you don't need to deal with other issues related to production.

RJSchwarz
San Diego, CA