3D animation is a complex art that can need years of schooling for perfection.
However, it can be remarkably easy to get started from the comfort of your home for self-taught professionals or hobbyists.
You can begin producing animations from scratch with a bit of studying, practice, and hard work.
So, How Can You Get Into 3d Animation As A Hobby?
If you want to learn more about 3D, you can download films from YouTube to study them frame to frame. As you watch, you should pay attention to pacing, storytelling, timing, camera angles, acting, staging, timing, lighting, everything that goes into making animation films. The more you practice creating an animation, the better you will get.
When studying and learning, it’s recommendable to research or know more beforehand.
Use YouTube to learn more about the software side and seek out knowledge and advice from industry experts to learn more about the principles of 3D animation.
Studying live and animated movies is a great idea to see how everything works. Let’s dive deeper into;
Various Tips For Getting Into 3D animation
1. Learn The Animation Basics
Well, to get started into 3D animation as a hobby, begin by understanding
- the basic terminology
- principles,
- techniques
- how traditional animation functions
- various animation methods, etc.
3D animation is a time-consuming procedure that needs a lot of patience.
You can try to sketch a few walk cycles during your leisure time, draw character sheets, make a flipbook, and learn about ideologies such as stretch and squash.
You can access lots of lessons online, but many books can be helpful when it comes to learning animation principles. Also, take your time to watch as many animations as possible.
Consider what you have learned from studying and observe how it is applied. See if you can figure out how some of the animation concepts were done.
2. Decide The Path You Will Take
The next step in getting into animation as a hobby is deciding the path you want to take.
Are you looking forward to being a digital animator or a traditional animator?
Do you want to get into stop-motion or cel animation, 2D or 3D animation?
Some individuals concentrate on only a single discipline, like in this case 3D, while others are jack of all trades.
Deciding on what you want to focus on will help you pursue the specific path more easily.
3. Choose Your Tools
You might be working with paper, pencils, and light tables or choose to go entirely software-based with a computer, laptop, Maya, or several other programs.
Selecting the software, you will work with can be challenging.
Different animation paths need different tools such as a laptop or painted cels as well as pairing digital and traditional techniques.
For 3D animation, there is various software you can use to make it in your career.
Maya provides an educational animation license for free, so if you are just doing it as a hobby, you can get started without using any money.
Blender is also a free program so that you can play around with it.
You can either use graphic tablets to draw on-screen using paper and pencil or scan them into your laptop.
You can then clean them up in Photoshop, edit the background, and use a layered file to fill in shading and color.
After that, you will need to import it into flash to layer over and sequence the background.
4. Practice Consistently
If you are doing 3D animation as a hobby, keep practicing until you perfect the skill.
Practice until you get numb from clutching your fingers on a mouse or cramping them around a pencil.
When you aren’t practicing, keep observing the life around you, how different objects interact with each other, how various stuff work, and practice applying that into your 3D animations.
Find the tools and methods that might work best for you, experiment, and practice more and more.
Animation is not easy, and there are new ways of doing things that you might not have tried before.
How Long Does It Take to Learn Animation as a Hobby?
Learning animation takes anywhere between one to three years to learn animation.
However, to become a professional animator, you may take more than ten years.
The craft of animation can be challenging to learn.
You need to master drawing characters and understand how time works.
The skills required to be a competent animator include; potentially understanding a 3D software application.
Unless you indeed are gifted, you should expect to take about three years to be skilled in animating.
In this time, you will be practicing basic movements, character, and locomotion animation.
Is It Essential To Know How To Draw?
Yes! While most individuals go right into learning animation on the computer, it is beneficial to have a foundation in drawing and art.
If you know drawing animals and humans, you will be a step ahead on many things.
This is particularly if you are planning to be a character animator.
Drawing individuals more often offers you an excellent education on perspective and anatomy, and these fundamentals will serve you remarkably well as a character animator.
Moreover, drawing on paper allows you to brainstorm quickly.
Making an animation on a computer often takes a lot of preparation and setup.
If you can promptly develop ideas on paper, you will make fewer mistakes when moving to the computer.
Finally, most animation story work is mostly still done on paper.
If you have aspirations of making 3D animations that most animators are, you will require to draw.
The ability to sketch storyboards will allow you to communicate a scene, a shot, or the whole movie.
Everything from films to commercials uses storyboards to draw out the story beats.
Some individuals specialize in storyboarding, although most animators utilize similar sketching to understand acting and timing.
The drawings easily control the direction of big projects, and they are significantly close to the final movie.
Should You Attend College to Acquire 3D Animation Skills?
No, you don’t require to go to college to work as a professional animator.
Some of the best animators in the world don’t have a college degree.
You can learn 3D animation yourself as a hobby without going to college.
You just need to follow the tips reviewed and have a computer for the 3D animation software to learn and understand the principles of 3D animation.
But with that said, most professional animators attend either college or art school.
Going to college will give you mentorship from teachers and alumni and gain friends that later offer a strong network.
Bottom Line
We hope you now understand how to get into 3D animation as a hobby.
As an animator, you never stop learning.
However, with practice and time, you will get better and better until you can actualize the dreams that made you want to get into 3D animation in the first place.
If you have any other tips that can help aspiring animators get into it, you can share them with us by commenting below.