Is it hard to learn to animate with Blender?

[Snooky]

Hey, i want to learn something new because i have a lot of free time currently, so i thought making animations would be cool. Now my Question: Is it hard to learn to animate with Blender? I heard SFM should be a little bit easier but is very outdated.

If i would start with Blender, do you know any good tutorial to watch? There are so many on the Internet and maybe some expert knows a good yt series

[Pte Jack]

The problem you're facing with Blender is it just updated to version 2.8x . The interface has changed, in some cases quite drastically, from what you'll see in most of the older videos on animating that use Blender 2.79b or older. If you want videosor tutorials, make sure to add Blender 2.8 to your search criteria.

[KAT_Editor]

What you mean by animation? Difference between objects moving and AAA character animations big enough.

[라]

Originally posted by lil hellboy:

Hey, i want to learn something new because i have a lot of free time currently, so i thought making animations would be cool. Now my Question: Is it hard to learn to animate with Blender? I heard SFM should be a little bit easier but is very outdated.

If i would start with Blender, do you know any good tutorial to watch? There are so many on the Internet and maybe some expert knows a good yt series

It'll take you a while to learn the basics and a few hundred hours worth of tutorials but the pay-off is worth it.

I wouldn't bother with SFM by the way.

[thekadani]

The basics are really easy, it's just like moving the object, than taking a snapshot of it, then move it again (as one would to with stop motion animations).

It's also really easy to do in blender, move your object (or bones of a rigged object if you know what this means already), move one frame forward in the timeline, press the i key when the mouse is still over the 3d view or the dedicated button in the timeline to add save this snapshot and that's the pure absolute basics.

You will notice that you can also move multiple frames forward, and press i or the button to add a so called key frame a few actual frames later and the animation will smoothly transition between these steps.

And this is the first hint that here's a big BUT!

There are much better techniques than this very simple manual approach where the computer (in the form of what blender as the software you run on it) can do a lot of otherwise tedious work for you and you still have good control over how the result will look like.

The "hard" part is to familiarize with the dozens of options you have for this and how to apply them for your benefit, there is a lot of common known techniques that have been proven over the years to work quite well and that help to speed up this process a lot and still get desired results and of course there's also the thing called experience you gain from just experimenting with it and practicing.

Disclaimer: I never really animated much with blender, I just know how it works in theory and what I don't know (all the nice or dirty tricks to get very good results in a very efficient way by using that theory in practice).

[Jon.Topps]

Grant Abbitt has some of the most amazing tutorials I've ever seen, and he's got tons of them on YouTube. It will help you get used to how Blender works, so you can create amazing stuff, but he also has some on the basics of animation that will get you going.

[*P0P$*FR3$H3NM3Y3R*]

Learning animation with blender surely beats SFM by a long stretch, as blender is much more versatile and has excellent documentation and tutorial ressources.

In terms of animation in general, it really depends on what you try to achieve.
You can do alot of stuff with simple keyframe animations. Stuff like making cars drive, have a building build up from its part etc. Stuff like that can be done very conveniently by just animating object properties, slider values etc.
For complex stuff like characters or complex mechanics you would have to look into the basics of rigging and the concept of controling a rig with animation curves.

Obviously both of the 2 branches are worth the time to learn them, the latter being much more complex but also super versatile.
I d say start with simple stuff that uses keyframes, paths and constraints to get used to the workflow with keyframes. From there on it will be much easier to adapt rigging and animation curves.