Hello everyone, I am a new animator and after doing some exercises im ready to move to a human rig. However theres something i wanna know.

When animating the face do you do it as you block the characters pose or do you do it after?

The main reason I am asking is because (if i got this right) there is a difference between animating the face and animating lip sync (which is where you do the jaw pass and all that)

Say i wanna make a character happy, do i do the happy faces as i block or do i just fo the body and leave the rest till later?

Seeking advice: Animation Vs Gym

Hi everyone I need some advice for something. Next week I will start going to the gym however I am a university students I have doing a full-time business course was also trying to find animation the truth is I don't really want to go but I kind of have to.

Problem is is that I am a beginner an animation I've been learning and have been having fun with it problem is is that if I decides of slap this on along with animation and school I feel as if I'll just be taking more time out of my day which could be spent learning and working on animation stuff.

I really don't want it to be like how it has been since 2024 where I do animation over the summer then half to drop it because of responsibilities only to start from the start next summer. It sucks.

I know it's all time management but I guess I just don't want to have to deal with another thing added to my schedule because I really just want to spend time on animation

Hello everyone I'm new to this sub but the reason why I came is because I wanted to ask a question that has been on my mind for some time now, the other day I was talking to my brother and he mentioned something that I didn't really come to me before. I felt like before in the past games had a good balance between a campaign that told a decent to really good story, with strong world building and art direction, while also having great multiplayer too.

These days however I feel as if when we get FPS games they usually tends to be multiplayer games that focus on the competitive aspect of things not saying that these games are bad but I feel as if we don't really have that 50-50 balance anymore yknow? I miss them mix between tuning in with my more competitive side but also looking up lore and such

Before I begin I want to sort of give some context I am born into a very religious conservative family and have two brothers my oldest and youngest who are on the spectrum.

I was time went on I started to have a change in beliefs but to this day nobody in my family knows and I don't know how they react to be honest I'm a little scared that I'll basically keep this up till the day I die. Because of this I feel as if I have missed out on so many experiences and then add covid to the mix and I have now become a social mess, I have been improving a little bit to the point that I can do casual conversation with a classmate in my university but as I go in for my final year this September I have come to realize that this whole time I have not made a genuine friend mostly at best a colleague (?)

Even something like gaming on online spaces have become hard for me despite the fact I have a mic I have been deathly afraid to go onto something like discord and enter into a voice chat or using voice chat in a game. This makes me sad because when I was little and my Xbox 360 and Xbox one I was talking to people effortlessly and making friends.

This sort of circles back to the start of what I was saying as to why I believe I have become this way which is that I rely heavily on my family financially, emotionally and such but I essentially feel like a spy in my own home and church as I don't have these beliefs anymore, this make it hard to make friends as if they found out I befriended someone from a group they don't accept it couldn't lead to a big fallout and idk if I will ever be mentally prepared for that. This was why I was talking about online stuff and video games as in the digital space my parents are not that tech savvy and as a results it allowed me to express my views without them being able to find them.

But, if I'm being honest, while being online and using social media has been a good thing in some ways, I also think it has been difficult for me.

Ever since 2019, I've been part of a friend group where I've never seen their faces, heard their voices, and vice versa. Because of that, along with the fact that I'm not particularly good-looking, I'm overweight, and I generally feel like I look weird, I've become quite anxious about showing my face online. I've slowly made peace with the idea that I'll probably never show my face publicly because of digital footprint concerns and everything that comes with putting yourself online.

I also want to clarify something about my relationship with my parents. I don't think they're abusive or that they're these villainous people. If anything, they care about me a lot. The difficult part is that they only really know one side of me. When you look at people who have told their parents something about themselves that their parents weren't expecting, you can sometimes see how much their behaviour towards them changes. I just don't know whether my parents would react that way, and that's something that makes me hesitant to open up to them about certain things.

I don't know if this means anything, but I also thought I'd clarify that I live in an African household. Things can be treated very differently in African households compared to other families, and if you grew up in one, you probably know what I mean.

I'm mainly looking for advice.

Also, I just realized I forgot to mention something about my brothers. They have their own issues as well, particularly my youngest brother. Because of the problems he has had from a young age, I never really felt like I could bring people over to my house. There was always some kind of chaos going on, and unfortunately, some of those issues still happen to this day.

So I never really had an environment where I could just invite people over and hang out with them normally. When you add that to everything else I've mentioned, I think you can start to understand why I'm in the position I'm in now.

I think all of these things have also led me to mostly make friends with people outside of the groups that my family would normally accept or be comfortable with. For example, gay people, trans people, people of other religions, and so on.

I think this has made me hesitant to form friendships with people like this in real life rather than online, because I'm constantly worried about two things: my parents finding out, or my friends finding out about my family and the environment I come from.

To be completely honest, I might even be part of some of those groups myself. And that's part of what makes this so difficult.

If I choose to befriend someone who is part of one of those groups, but then I go home to a family like mine, or go to Sunday service and listen to my pastor say the kind of rhetoric you'd expect, it feels like a betrayal of the people I call my friends. Especially if I'm sitting there putting on an act, clapping and going along with what they're saying even though it isn't what I actually believe.

I know that I don't necessarily have control over what my family says or believes, but I still feel guilty about being connected to an environment where those things are being said.

And honestly, I'm starting to wonder if that makes me a bad person.

Was planning to go see the new Spider-Man movie, but I have gone to other cinemas before, and the screen quality was not good

Hi everyone, I have been learning Blender animation and came across a video recently from p2design. In this video, he mentioned the reason why game animators animate at 30fps is that 30 is a number that is compatible with people's monitors, allowing them to scale up the frames depending on what hz a person's monitor has (for like 60hz is 30 fps and 30fps = 60 fps, same for 120 and such)

thing is as i go on my animation journey, i thought it would be cool one day (if good enough) i could animate for an indie or something, but I would also like to make funny animations to post on the internet!

I'm probably overthinking (might not even be a big deal), but I wanted to get your thoughts as if i should animate at 30 fps, if there are any pros and cons too as i know 24 fps is the standard for film stuff

Hello everyone, sorry, just wanted to ask 2 things:

1. I have been doing bouncing ball stuff as I am new. And I learned that in the breakdown stage, it's where you track arcs and leads and such. So I wanted to know, if I wanted to do something like a ball going through an obstacle course, how do I know what leads and drags when doing breakdowns, as it's a ball and not a human rig?

2. When animating facial expressions on a character, during the blocking stage do you block the facial expressions along with the main poses and such or do you do the body first and then the face? (Expressions, Lip Sync, Eye Darts ect)

Ty!

https://preview.redd.it/9649niyqzleh1.png?width=1751&format=png&auto=webp&s=2c1cae96d0228c17e528af3919f74616dc0dd1e7

Hello everyone, thanks for helping me with my last post! This time around, I wanted to ask something. You see, I was looking over this tutorial by "Alex On Story" about the pose-to-pose workflow! And I wanted to ask if the diagram posted above is true? The reason why i ask this is that, although I like his tutorial, I am not really sure if I like how the final result looks when it comes to movement, and I notice that when I watch other animators, its looks different!

Do other animators do this "Pose, Pose, Settle" method? (dw you can ignore the breakdown as ik what that is!)

Just as another note, I think I find it a bit hard at times as Alex does not seem to use reference, choosing to animate from imagination instead. Would anyone know any tutorials where its spline blocking and such?

Good Morning!

I've been learning 3D animation for a while now and have been working through the fundamentals. So far I've done things like bouncing balls, ball exercises, and a walk cycle. I definitely feel like I'm improving, but I also feel a bit stuck.

My long-term goal is to make internet-style animations like CODA, meme animations you see on TikTok or YouTube, as well as action and fight scenes. I know animation is a skill that takes years to get good at, and I'm completely okay with that. I'm not looking for a shortcut.

The problem is that I'm not sure what I should actually be practicing after the basic fundamentals. I know exercises are important, but I don't want to get trapped in an endless cycle of doing exercise after exercise without ever making actual animations.

Recently I watched a video called something like "How I'd Learn Animation If I Had to Start Over." The creator had pages and pages of exercises to work through, and while they all looked useful, it honestly felt a little overwhelming.

So I guess my main question is:

How do you balance practicing exercises with actually making projects? What's the most effective way to improve while still creating things you're proud of?

I've set myself a goal that by the end of this year, I'd like to be able to create a complete animation from posing to polishing to rendering that looks decent, all without needing to pause every few minutes to look up a tutorial. It doesn't have to be amazing; I just want to reach the point where I can sit down with an idea and bring it to life.

One other thing I've been trying to figure out is workflow. I know as a beginner it's probably best to stick with a standard approach, but I'm still trying to find what clicks for me. I've tried stepped/blocking, but it didn't really feel natural, and I'm not sure spline blocking is the answer either. I know there are different approaches like pose-to-pose, straight ahead, and layered animation, but I'm still trying to figure out which workflow is best for me as a beginner. If anyone has advice on that, I'd really appreciate it.

I'd love to hear how you approached this stage of learning and what helped you improve the fastest. I have talked about it in other posts but I think my main issue is that I have difficulty retaining the information after I watched the tutorial and I don't mean like tutorial hell or something I will watch it tutorial take notes do a version where I follow the notes and it goes well but then when I try to do it without notes they all just vanishes which makes the learning process frustrating

Also, as a side question: does anyone have any good recommendations for facial animation tutorials?

Hello everyone, was hoping for some help on this! I have been doing a few animation exercises but have been rather unhappy with the workflows being used as i am feeling a bit "boxed in". I am only doing this as a hobby, not a job.

After looking around and taking apart different workflows and mashing them, i found a video from Sir Wade called "7 workflows animators used" and he talked about what he called "key categories" The idea is you work on one part of the animation at a time, so you do all the following each, moving down the list:

1. Golden Poses + Antics

2. Overlap/Follow through (When something overshoots and comes back)

3. Extremes

4. Breakdowns #1 (Bias/Leads/Arcs)

5. Breakdown #2 (Bias/Drag/Arc)

6. Holds

4 and 6 are from another video that talks about beginner workflow, but I wanted to get some advice from people who have some time under their belt on this, would you move this list order around a certain wat for a beginner? or add anything to it? ty for reading

as the title says

i am new to this, have done some bouncing ball animations and will probably go over them some more to drill the knowledge into my head. but i am stuck on one thing.

My desired goal down the line is to be an animator that can make good looking animation but also things like: acting shots, trending topics and (the one i reaaally wanna achieve) fight scenes.

thing is, when i look infront it seems that there is so much that needs to be covered before i can even reach those things yk? m also dont get me wrong ik what i signed up for when i began learning animation in my freetime but yeah.

any advice?

TLDR: While I start my animation journey with the bouncing ball, im worried ill just end up doing exercise after exercise and never really make anything for myself (like fan animation and fights) but i am also so new to the point that i cant to that and i wanted to know how can i juggle both exercises to increase knowlege while also being able to have fun and work on things i wanna do

Edit: ONE LAST THING I FORGOT TO MENTION, my goal isnt really to become a crazy good animator, i sat down and had a big think about this but basically, i am not really trying to be like a "pixar" level animator if you get what i mean, i want to find a nice balance between quality and quantiy (like i make good looking animations but i can also work at a good pace that is more my pace while i deal with stuff like school)

as the title says

i am new to this, have done some bouncing ball animations and will probably go over them some more to drill the knowledge into my head. but i am stuck on one thing.

My desired goal down the line is to be an animator that can make good looking animation but also things like: acting shots, trending topics and (the one i reaaally wanna achieve) fight scenes.

thing is, when i look infront it seems that there is so much that needs to be covered before i can even reach those things yk? m also dont get me wrong ik what i signed up for when i began learning animation in my freetime but yeah.

any advice?

TLDR: While I start my animation journey with the bouncing ball, im worried ill just end up doing exercise after exercise and never really make anything for myself (like fan animation and fights) but i am also so new to the point that i cant to that and i wanted to know how can i juggle both exercises to increase knowlege while also being able to have fun and work on things i wanna do

Edit: ONE LAST THING I FORGOT TO MENTION, my goal isnt really to become a crazy good animator, i sat down and had a big think about this but basically, i am not really trying to be like a "pixar" level animator if you get what i mean, i want to find a nice balance between quality and quantiy (like i make good looking animations but i can also work at a good pace that is more my pace while i deal with stuff like school)

Hello everyone to give some context I am making a new Twitter account however I want to bring all over the people I follow on my old account, but I'm worried that if I do so I'll get banned or shadow band or something I am not too knowledgeable about this side of Twitter I was hoping I could get some help!

I am feeling lost at the moment so I am looking up debates and scripture but this one seems solid and I can't find any responses to this.

I was going to post in r/Christianity but was worried it might start something

Thank you

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Hey guys, I am not trying to start anything, just not really tech savy and wanted to know something.

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I got my switch 2 and played DK bananza but alot of the time like during boss battles, the elephant form and especially the end I had really big frame drops, i might even say it dipped below 30 because i swear it was going really slow (i have past gen consoles and play them at 30 fps but for dk at time it was like a slideshow)

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when i went online i was told that others either didnt experience this or they did and it was minor

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i have a switch connected to a 174hz monitor (i know the switch mostly does 30 - 60 for most and 120 for some games)

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could my monitor be the reason or is there an issue with my switch?

Hey guys, I am not trying to start anything, just not really tech savy and wanted to know something.

I got my switch 2 and played DK bananza but alot of the time like during boss battles, the elephant form and especially the end I had really big frame drops, i might even say it dipped below 30 because i swear it was going really slow (i have past gen consoles and play them at 30 fps but for dk at time it was like a slideshow)

when i went online i was told that others either didnt experience this or they did and it was minor

i have a switch connected to a 174hz monitor (i know the switch mostly does 30 - 60 for most and 120 for some games)

could my monitor be the reason or is there an issue with my switch?

Hello everyone, this is a bit of a different type of post for me. Usually when I make posts, it's to ask about Blender or learning stuff, but this time I wanted to ask something from a more emotional perspective instead.

Also, quick warning: this post is a bit of a yap session, mostly because I feel like context matters here. You don't have to read all of it if you don't want to, and I completely understand if you skip parts. I've split my issues into sections, so if one stands out to you more than another, feel free to just respond to that one. But I would genuinely appreciate any thoughts because this stuff has been weighing on me a lot lately.

For some quick context: back in 2024, with AI becoming a huge thing and everything happening around it, I wanted to try something new because I wasn't really enjoying drumming anymore. I had recently gotten a new gaming PC, and I ended up finding 3D animation really interesting, so I decided to install Blender and give it a shot.

I watched tutorials, learned the UI, and made some progress here and there. The problem was that I'm also a full-time university student studying advertising and marketing, so I kept taking long breaks because of assignments and exams. Whenever I'd come back, I'd feel like I forgot a lot of what I learned and had to relearn things all over again.

My goal right now is pretty simple: I want to get good at animation. I'm not trying to become some Pixar-level animator or anything crazy. I mainly want to make things I'd enjoy watching myself: character acting, memes, action scenes, dances, fan animations, stuff like that.

Problem #1: Balancing life and animation

The first thing I've been struggling with is balancing animation with life in general.

If I'm being honest, I'm not really passionate about the degree I'm doing (Marketing and Advertising). I mostly chose it because I wasn't sure what I wanted to do at the time. One thing that has been worrying me a lot lately is the future and the idea of ending up in a full-time office job and then becoming too exhausted to animate afterwards.

The office job itself isn't really the problem. It's more the fear of becoming so overworked that I stop having the energy to pursue something I actually care about. I've heard stories about overtime and people being completely burnt out, and I guess part of me worries that I'll eventually end up in that situation.

I've thought about maybe prioritising jobs with better work-life balance even if it means less money, because having time for things that matter to me feels worth it. I guess I wanted to ask: how do people actually balance work and creative goals? Have any of you dealt with something similar?

Problem #2: Feeling like I'm fighting Blender itself

This one is kind of hard to explain.

It's not really that I don't know Blender. I've watched tutorials, learned shortcuts, and I know my way around the software. I know a lot of things like the back of my hand.

The issue is that whenever I try to actually do something, I run into really specific problems. I could be following an animation tutorial and then suddenly something weird happens in the graph editor, or Blender starts behaving differently than expected, and I have absolutely no idea why.

Then suddenly I end up spending ages Googling things, searching Discord servers, or asking questions online. (Side note: people here have helped me a lot before and I genuinely appreciate it.)

The frustrating part is that I want to spend my time learning animation itself, but sometimes it feels like I spend more time trying to figure out Blender than actually animating. It feels like trying to untangle a giant mess of cables sometimes. Not every step obviously, but often enough that it becomes really demotivating.

Problem #3: Learning vs making my own things

I've been having trouble understanding when I'm supposed to be learning and when I'm supposed to actually start making things.

At the moment I mostly have basics under my belt. I've done bouncing balls, overlap exercises, some walk cycles and run cycles before, but because of the long breaks I took, I feel like some of that knowledge got wiped from my brain a bit.

Whenever I try making my own projects, I feel like I don't know enough yet. But then if I only do exercises, I feel like I'll never actually create anything.

I think part of the problem is that I'm used to school where there's a clear path: start with A, then B, then C. But being self-taught feels very different because I see people saying things like "find your own path," and honestly that's kind of alien to me.

I remember trying to jump from bouncing ball exercises straight into animating a game character doing a meme animation using references, and it honestly just wasn't going well. I know beginners are supposed to make bad things and struggle, but I started wondering if maybe I just bit off way more than I could chew.

Because I'm self-taught, I don't really know what progression is supposed to look like. I know about the fundamentals and the 12 principles, and I'm trying to learn them properly, but sometimes I feel like I'm navigating my own little Wild West.

Was going from ball to character too big of a jump? How do I know when I'm ready to make that transition?

Problem #4: Motivation and repeating old mistakes

This last one goes a bit beyond animation itself.

Back when I was doing drumming, I eventually realised I had gotten into it for the wrong reasons. I wasn't really doing it because I loved the art itself. I was more focused on what it could eventually get me, like trying to escape the normal work path and achieve some end goal.

Even though I quit drumming, I think it still taught me something important.

This time around with animation, I genuinely feel like I want to do it because I enjoy it and because I want to create things. But I still get this little voice in my head sometimes saying things like: "You need to be good by this age," or "you need to improve by this date," and if I don't, somehow I've failed.

That same mindset played a role in me quitting drumming, and I really don't want history to repeat itself.

Part of me also wants to prove myself wrong. When I was younger I kind of saw myself as someone who wasn't talented or couldn't really make things while everyone else around me could. I want to prove to myself that I can actually stick to something and improve.

If you somehow made it through all of this, thank you. Seriously. I know I can ramble, but this stuff has genuinely been on my mind a lot lately and I really don't want to lose the excitement and motivation I have for animation, even if my skills haven't caught up yet.

I'd appreciate any thoughts or advice.

Hello everyone the title basically says it's all at the moment I have finished exams for a level 7 degree in digital marketing with hopes of continuing on to level 8 of the course I talked about this before but basically as time goes on I don't worry about my future especially when I go on here or other Irish threads and see discussions about how it's basically impossible to get a job now.

It's a big complicated but due to stuff that's very personal for majority of my life I was never really able to get a part-time job and this summer I was planning on first getting a driver's license and driving now I passed my theory test and secondly working on my own goals and ambitions. This may also sound a bit dumb but in relation to the goals and ambition parts I also really wanted to use my summertime to work on my 3D animation skills as one of my hopes is to work with 3D animation and some capacity whether it be working in a studio or as a freelance or even just a social media thing but that's something else.

However as I try to do this I feel this pit in my stomach that I'm doing things wrong since other people in my class have jobs and it makes me feel as if I am a failure in a sense you know what I mean?

So I wanted to get your thoughts on this and thank you for reading.

Hi everyone, I’m looking for some advice on something I’ve been struggling with while learning 3D character animation in Blender.

For context, I’ve been learning animation on and off since around 2024, mostly in my free time while also being a full-time university student. Now that summer is here, I want to properly get back into it and improve.

The issue I’m running into is with tutorials.

Because of university, I’m very used to learning by taking notes, memorising information, and then regurgitating it for exams. But animation feels completely different because it’s not just theory. It’s a practical skill where you actually have to build muscle memory, understand movement, make decisions while animating and such yk?

When I watch tutorials, I can usually understand what the person is doing in the moment. But once I try to do it myself, I often forget the practical steps. For example, I’ll forget what controls they moved on the rig, what order they blocked things in, how they approached the poses, or how they knew what part of the character to adjust.

So I end up feeling like I “understood” the tutorial while watching it, but I struggle to actually recreate the process without following along step by step.

My goals are mainly character animation: acting, facial animation, running, fight scenes, parkour/action shots, silly animated videos, and maybe short dances. I’m not trying to become a professional overnight, but I do want to improve this summer and actually make small finished animations instead of only doing exercises forever.

I guess my question is:

How do you personally learn from animation tutorials in a way that actually sticks?