Blender for animations

First of all - thank you so much for support this month!

I've been in search for an animation program for quite a while, despite that I work in Modo and know Maya, and 3ds Max (though might be rusty on this one) I still wasn't sure what program would suit our project better. 

So far I rigged the original dinosaur in Modo and really hated every singe moment of that process.
I even had to write a bunch of tutorials for myself after I figured out just the right sequence of actions required to set up a limb ready for animation...
And you know what? I had to repeat this process all over again for each limb! Done with the left arm? Now do the same for the right arm.. etc etc for wings and legs and every continuous chain (spine, tail, neck, and some other stuff) required nothing else but manual labor.

Don't get me wrong - I love Modo, for modelling its awesome, but when it comes to rigging in it - it's a nightmare... And its not only me who agrees on that topic, plus performance and FPS for the animations is kinda bad.

So after this I've set sail to search for a new program just for animations - and I've stumbled upon Akeytsu. The animations of the test-skeleton-guy who runs around in the most recent demo is done inside of it. 

Akeytsu really made me happy at first, such ease of use - just make a skeleton and it's ready to go! Animate it, no time required to set up the control rig at all. Bones are selected by just clicking on the mesh, which is revolutionary in 3d animation (no 3d programs allow you to do that actually) and super convenient...

But the more I used it, the more I realized the problem with it. I spent hours adjusting the feet so they actually stayed on the ground, there is no automated system that supports that. There is no way to do common animation techniques, such as overlaps, because the program follows the principles of "traditional animation"... Surely it sounds cool on paper, but on practice -  it was a lot of pain animating that little test skeleton which even was supposed to have bad throwaway animations on purpose.

I will still use Akeytsu for a few things, maybe to quickly animate some birds, fishes, other critters, or maybe elementals (enemies)... But main characters really demand something more than this program offers.

So what to do then? Modo is not only unfriendly for rigging, but it's also something that not a lot of people use. Akeytsu is relatively cheap, but lacks features that the main characters demand. Maya and Max are extremely expensive and overloaded with features that I don't even need... The only logical solution to this problem - is Blender.

Blender is a free open source GNU program everyone probably heard about at some point. Anyone can download it and try to learn it. It's certainly feature complete for animations. 

I had my prejudice against it before... Several years back I tried it and it was awful back then xD. But It came a long way since then, now its very good, that's for sure.

For the past few days I've been doing some intensive studying on Blender, watching a lot of tutorials on 2x speed, downloading the knowledge right into my brain. And today I can say that I reached the point where I'm actually confident that I can make it work for our game! 

Surely it will require more time to set up, but it should be less pain to animate later on, meaning better quality animations for our main character species.

And most importantly - anyone can just open our game character rigs done in Blender and animate them how they want, absolutely for free.

When developing this game, the topic of moddability comes up a lot, all the systems we're creating for items, weapons, bodyparts, etc - make it possible to add new or replace existing content with mods. In fact, even the game itself is just like another big mod for the system that adds base game content (which can even be turned off for blank slate).

For sure modders are going to want to try adding their own animations into the game as well, especially when we get closer to the more naughty side of things... Maya, Max, Modo, Akeytsu - are all paid programs of variable prices, while Blender is free and it has just the same feature set those paid programs have.

Thank you for reading!
And let me know what do you think about changing the animation pipeline like that!
Have you used Blender yourself?
Comment down below or in Discord!