Spring RTS Engine

What are the names of some great animation computer programs? I want to know what kind of animation programs the big comanies use. Like for example what they used to make the short clips of Final Fantasy XII, or the animation sequences that are used in many movies.
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market samurai ~ marketsamurai ~ marketsamurai.com

someone should move this to OT forum.. it srsly looks like a bot asked this question though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_compute ... s_software
like google couldn't have given you the answers to such a question.

You will find though that the tools don't make the art.. the artist does.
Also that creative constraints with inspiration create unique art.
And that it will take a lot of practice and work to make anything worthy of the big names.

Most of these companys use heavy modified versions of comercial available 3d-programs, like 3dsmax or maya. With heavily modified, i mean that they have a lot of inhouse written tools for animating hair, physickobjects, skintransparency (thats a really difficult one), and most of them use motioncapture one way or the other (either direct capturing artist performances or videocapturing and then fram for fram animation).

Most difficult are, as strange as it sounds, facial animations, because even if you catch the 1000 possible mixtures of the basic expressions, there is still the possibility the people catch you at cheating. (Eyes dont blink enough, some muscles do not twitch for partseconds when a char is lying)

Not even children will take a pure cgi-human for real, we are sort of experts on that, and even avatar relied heavily on real actors (especially for facial expressions). So if you want to do something really good, make a movie of the face expression that suits it, make that movie a texture in max, and animate your char frame for frame to look like that.

Have fun, its hard work, but the results can be rewarding.

Overlord
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKL3FBjg ... re=related

Kameo: Elements of Power
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htfYTr-U ... re=related

Most applications that do 3d modeling and rendering have support for animation. Blender, Maya, and 3D Studio can all do this kind of thing.

Most commonly used are Maya, 3DS, or C4D, but any 3D package is more than enough for a hobbyist or someone just getting started. There are lots of free ones, most notably Blender.

Imho Cinema 4D is the best.