Is WebAnimate any good?

Unity Engine
1

Hey All,

I’m just getting into 3D Animation as part of the development for our game - we are a small team - so I’ve been ‘forced’ to wear this hat :wink:

I’m looking for a relatively easy to use and cheap tool that still produces decent results. A few people have recommended WebAnimate for the work i’ll be doing (rigging, re-targeting etc.). Does anyone have any views on it? Its is good tool? Worth $20 / month?

If not any alternatives and why?

Cheers,

Charlie

2

I’d personally suggest Maya LT or Blender. Blender is completely free and Maya LT is comparable in price to your listed $20/mo. Maya LT is available through Steam.
The benefits of both packages is the integration in Unity and the huge communities both apps have. This gives you a leg up on information when you run into issues (which you will), and the community has a huge offering of free training material that can get you up and running in a short amount of time.

If you didn’t have the price restriction I would suggest 3D Max because that’s my software of choice and I believe it’s an awesome animation package.

Sorry I don’t know anything about webanimate.

3

Thanks for the info.

The main reason for my interest in WebAnimate was that a few of my professional animator friends mentioned that Dreamworks now use it a very similar technology (from the same firm). I’m just not sure how easy it is to use, and how it compares directly to other packages.

Does anyone out there use WebAnimate?

4

Fortunately for dreamworks professional animators they don’t have the same real-time restrictions, imports/export, drawcalls, configuration management and resource limitations for textures, meshes, bones, hierarchies and key frame processes we lowly indie animators have.

Looks like a mocap converter to me with some minimal key frame editing on mocap data.
That’s probably why dreamworks people like it. (No disrespect to dreamworks animators intended)

Here’s one Unity related video I found with a 10 second google search;

And browsing the site it looks like they have a free version with supporting tutorials

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When you’ve checked it out please return to the forums and let us indie animators know how it is, though if you feel like your being ‘forced’ to wear the animator hat I’m skeptical you will find any enjoyment in the experience.

5

Thanks alot for all the info theANMATOR2b,

I’ll check it out and get back to you - what is the best forum to post my feedback in?

BTW - I was being a little ‘tongue-in-cheek’ when I said I was forced into the Animation side - I don’t know alot about it, but I’m eager to learn!

6

I’ve used alot of animation tools, but I’m in love with Blender. From what I’ve seen with Webanimate seem much like what theAnimator2b said. I’ve watch alot of their videos, and the auto solvers for mocaps looks very interesting. If you want tho, you could, with a bunch of work, set up something exactly like this in Blender. If all I did all day was retarget mocaps, then I might look into Webanimate, or create my own solution. As it is, the whole point of Mecanim is to standardize a character rig so that as many animations as possible are usable, so Mecanim handles the retargeting.

For me, Blender is just the perfect tool, and once you learn it, it makes altering animations or motion capture easy. The Dopesheet and Curve editor rocks, and I can easily trade animations and assets between blend files. The whole Blender UI is customizable too.

Like theAnimator2b says too, the creative communities and tutorials are abundant. I even know a few Blender developers that will actually consider features and ask for my feedback.

7

Great advice from an experienced Blender animator.
I believe for the price :slight_smile: blender is the best option for any beginning animator. I think Max is the easiest to learn, and Maya is the best overall rigger/animator of the bunch. I don’t know too many game artists who use XSI or Lightwave any more. XSI is pretty robust in broadcast and Lightwave last I checked was heavily supported and used in South America.
There are others as well modo and others but I decided early on to stick with one package and I’ve never regretted it.
I would suggest the same, once you decide upon an animation package to use stick with it. These applications do so much it takes 5-10 years to become an honest competent user with the entire tool beyond the average user processes.

Good luck.