Hi, I do animation movies. And I wonder if Unity is for animations/graphics, or if it´s just for games?
I have no idea how to compare Unity to what you would otherwise do with animation movies.
However, Unity can be used for animations & graphics (as I’m sure you knew).
Try putting some graphics and animations into Unity & see if it suits you Best way to know, I think, for your particular situation.
made with unity,
http://en.marza-realtime.com/concept
Unity is primarily for real time applications. It’s designed to pump out a frame every 16 ms. You can’t do much in 16 ms.
You’ll get much better results doing film with software that takes seconds or minutes to do a frame.
Unity does have applications where film needs meets realtime applications. So motion capture, VR and the like.
I encourage you to use Unity for anything that can take advantage of real-time graphics. Yes, realtime graphics are starting to look amazing! Still, maybe don’t invest in a game engine unless you intend to do interactivity, that’s what it’s for.
Remember, that’s being rendered real-time on a $600-800 GPU.
If you just want to make Pixar-style cartoon animations, you can do everything you need in Blender, and learning to do all of it in Blender will be rewarding. Additionally, ANYTHING you make in blender can later be used in Unity. There is no lost Unity study spent in Blender.
(I guess this sin’t really for the OP, who already kinda said they do this stuff - i’m sorry, no sense trashing it now boys)
If you’re gonna do either of these, and you’re not familiar with Blender, please please please, stop wasting your time in Blender right now and go pay $30 and take the CGcookie Blender introductions. You can download any number of their videos for your 1 month subscription, so if this is a lot of money for you just spend the whole time downloading dozens of videos - any one of them is better than anything on YouTube, people who speak clearly, have a lesson-plan, talk about theory over application then about application too. A couple dudes with real industry experience over there.
I say the Blender introduction because you might be tempted to skip the “UI and interface” type video. Yeah, they’re gonna cove some stuff you know. Still, make written notes of the things you don’t know during that UI tutorial. Those are the things keeping you from using Blender well - not understanding the UI. (ie, what the heck is this where am I where did that window go (what was it called) and how do I get it back, why is this stuck on my cursor, why is rotation different now)
The other big general tip in regards to getting into 3D art: Do stuff “non-destructively.” Figure out how to make a wedge section of a tire and rotate it using an array modifier, learn how to make a chain by setting an array modifier to repeat and rotate a link and follow a curve. Store modifier-stack objects on the one row of Blender layers, then apply modifier and output a mesh into the other row of Blender layers attached.
Everyone else already said what needed to be said, but I want to add that I think it’d be really neat to see a ‘film’ done that benefits from the realtime graphics implementation a game engine provides.
Imagine a short film that takes place during the same time of day that you’re watching it. Watch it during the day, and the room is full of natural sunshine. At night, it’s lit by the lamps in the room. During the day you hear birds outside, while at night it’s crickets and owls. What if changing the language at the main menu gave you different lip sync in the movie, so the characters mouth movements matched your natural language more closely? What if you customized the avatar of the main character before the film started so it resembled you?
That’s kind of all I can think of that involves realtime graphics without directly involving the viewer/player during runtime. Of course, once you start doing that, you’re venturing more into the territory of a FMV game than you are film, but there could still be some interesting overlap there.
Well, then of course VR is a thing (at least according to some). I think people are already making VR films that have no real interactivity except this: you’re watching it in VR, which means it’s rendered in stereo and the view changes as you move your head. That pretty much requires real-time rendering.