How to make a 3D animation Film on Personal PC?

There are a lot you need to learn to generate a animation movie. The basic process of animation film production includes: pre-design, mid-production and post-compositing and vfx.

In the early stage of design, the most basic content is to produce or obtain a good story to make the movie interesting. You also need to decide on the storyboard, script and art style. Mid-stage production includes modeling and shading of animated characters and scenes, completion of lighting and animation, and final rendering. Post-compositing and vfx involves optimizing the rendering and producing the final piece. So this is a very complex project that requires teamwork (not to mention the tedious work of raising funds in the early stage and publicity in the later stage).

Say if you are trying to make a simple 3d animation, here are some tips that might be helpful:

The basic steps that you need to generate a 3d animation with your computer on your own(the mid-production stage mentioned above) including：

Modeling — Set shadings — Rigging — Animation — VFX — Lighting — Rendering

Modeling refers to the creation of all the characters and environments that needed in the animation. (In order to make this step easier, you will need to draw some conceptual designs for reference).

Set shading is like color your characters and scenes. You will need to apply textures and materials according to needs to how more realistically how objects should look based on animation styles.

Rigging is to add bones and controllers to the torso and facial expressions of the built model, and to attach the model to the added bones, so that the animators in the next stage can add vivid movements and expressions to the character.

Animation is when you make the models move. This including the base blocking animation for basic key post settings and add more details to input your character a soul.

VFX is those effects, such as fire, smoke, explosion and so on that can make your animation to a new level.

Lighting helps to simulate natural light by placing virtual light sources to achieve a more realistic visual effect.

Rendering is the last step of the whole process and the most popular algorithm is ray tracing.

All seven steps above can be done in 3d modeling and animation software like blender, maya, 3ds max, etc. You may find may great tutorials easily on YouTube, and here are some suggestions if you’d like to use blender(free):

1. XRender has compiled a lot of tips for blender creation and related free tools. The content is being updated constantly, you may visit the XRender official website for more information: Blender creation tips, add-ons and more.

2. The classic donut tutorial by Blender Guru, with a new series for blender 3.0:

3. The “Learn blender over the course of 7 days” by CrossMind Studio. You can learn one part a day, a total of 7 days and create a cute aircraft:

4. Tutorial on how to make a realistic 3D apple scene by Zach Reinhardt from cgcookie:

As for the final step, rendering, it is a process that requires a huge amount computing resource. If you have no plans to purchase more servers or update hardware equipment in the short term, you can use a render farm, which is, to use a large number of rendering nodes from a third platform to complete rendering. This can greatly reduce rendering time without taking up your own computer.