The Future for Animation in Blender

I know this is off-topic, but please listen.

I’ve been following the development of animation tools in blender and maya for a long time, and over the past 5 years, maya is becoming more and more the standard for creating 3D animation, of course, blender has also done a lot for animators in these 5 years, but I have a question, what’s next? How will developers surprise animators? It’s a shame that a lot of people go to maya and not to blender, because if you look at blender is a good enough tool for animation, I hope that in some blender 4.0, we will get more tools dI’ve been following the development of animation tools in blender and maya for a long time, and over the past 5 years, maya is becoming more and more the standard for creating 3D animation, of course, blender has also done a lot for animators in these 5 years, but I have a question, what’s next? How will developers surprise animators? It’s a shame that a lot of people go to maya and not to blender, because if you look at blender is a good enough tool for animation, I hope that in some blender 4.0, we will get more tools For animation, there may already be plans to advance the creation of animations in blender in the future, but I don’t know.

I’ll understand if this post is deleted/blocked, just thinking out loud, I’ll hope that blender will still show something cool and compete with maya.

there is an animation development project, for the implementation of which industry veterans will be involved. the problem is that it is necessary to conduct webinars / meetings live, but COVID does not allow this to be done. Therefore, it has been postponed, and until the restrictions are lifted, work will continue on those projects that can be worked on with the online community

2 Likes

What is this project? Where can I find out more? It wasn’t shut down? Does that mean they’ll be working on animation tools?

there is almost no information on it, I have not found more at least. all I know is that it failed to start because of the covid. in general, when the restrictions are lifted, then we will see

Thank you, I hope in the future blender will be as functional and convenient for animation in the future, we will find out what awaits us

It’s going to take a decade for Blender to reach Maya’s level in animation, so don’t hold your hopes high,if you can use both softwares with their own strengths.

He clearly need some tools foranimation inspired by the game engine… Like VERTEX SHADER ANIMATION, Or like procedural system emitter and many more option…

I’ve heard that they have project animation 22 again (which was supposed to be back in 2020), as well as a realistic short film project heist, I think in the next 5 years, we can definitely say that blender is a good platform for 3d animation of any complexity, Amazon back in 2020 gave support to blender developers to create and improve animation tools. I think that soon, more precisely, this year and next year, we will learn more about new and updated animation tools.

@sanek Did you mean that?

@B3ly, seriously about what?

I thought you were talking about an animation project called animation 22 and a short film project heist, back in 2020, Amazon funded blender to create and improve animation tools. I don’t know if that’s what you meant, or something else.

@sybren I’m very sorry for distracting you from work, it’s just better to get an official response, isn’t it? What’s in store for us in the coming years in animation tools, do you have plans to bring in more professionals or other animators to make blender one of the coolest programs for animators and animation of any complexity and level? What awaits us In the future with animation for blender? Will there be any interesting projects more realistic than cartoons, what to expect from animation tools in the next 5 years. Please make blender one of the best animation programs in the near future.

I asked animators what they would like to see in the future for animation:

Quote #1:
Maya has better rigging system, more premade high quality rigs, and better export/import support especially for Autodesk formats including FBX.

Quote #2:
I was taught Maya in school because it’s what a very large portion of the games/tv/film industry uses

Quote #3:
Pretty sure he said that he uses Maya because it has been industry standard thought Blender might be taking that soon or in a few years if it keeps evolving. I am pretty sure there’s a damn ton of resources on many specific things for Maya and there’s some really neat scripts that you can make to do things in Maya if you are used to it.

Quote #4: maya More and more convenient tools for creating any animation, yes, blender is also a good solution for creating animation, but so far few people do something big, I am sure that in the future blender will also do animations of different levels, the main thing is convenient tools, more animators, and aspirations.

Quote #5:
Same here. One of the reasons many industries use Maya is because they’re able to write their own proprietary tools and add-ons for it, and it is easy to move data in and out of it (like exporting and importing models and animations for example). Blender only recently started adding barebones functionality for importing and exporting various kinds of data, and for the most part it tries to make you do everything in Blender rather than let people make workflows that use other more specialized programs to do certain tasks better.

Quote #6: why don’t you concentrate on fixing the technical debt and redesigning the animation system? I’ve been looking at your rigging roadmap. I will not reinvent the wheel, and I will repeat the meaning of the reaction to this map of one rigger who works in a blender: if there are no animators who will use a blender, then there will be no sense from professional rigging tools. and they don’t go because the animation tools are bad. and at the same time, this is not only a response from professionals (at least in the Russian blender community, I quite often saw people express themselves vividly, covering everything with a three-story mat, due to the fact that it is difficult for them to animate in a blender due to the lack of many features), I saw a beginner who, having started studying animation, preferred Maya crack to blender. And no, I’m not trying to expose the blender as a bad program, I’m tending to the fact that we really need to make a breakthrough, and deal with the problems you have voiced, and finally start improving the animation toolset. I don’t understand why you didn’t put it in the first place. you understand everything perfectly, quite possibly even better than me

There is no plan announced for animation 2022 at least from their official channels, and of course it all depends on the current covid situation.
also my point is that for them to develop tools that are well mature and established is going to take awhile, for example the everything nodes project which should touch rigging nodes is going to be first so that in itself is on hold as they’re slowly working on other parts of Blender, if there are more new developers who can help maybe they can shorten it to 5 yrs, but with the current small team it’s definitely 10 yrs imho at least to the level we hope blender to be in.

Formerly called ‘Animation 2020’, but for prevailing reasons it could not start last year. The good news it that Blender Foundation received a big grant from AWS to invest in character animation tools the coming 3 years. We want to involve experienced character TDs from the industry (veteran Jason Schleifer is available), including recruiting top developers who are in for a challenge (recruitment starts Q2 ’21). Specs include work on speed (threading, prefetch, caching); Node system for drivers/constraints/deforms; character debugging tools; redesign armatures to work for mocap, controls and automated systems (muscles); multi-layer posing and allowing tweaks on top of caches; advanced interaction/selection (including widget-less posing, diagram views); and of course to be well aligned with USD. Let’s stop here!

Hi guys,

Blender Devtalk is aimed at discussing Blender development. We want to encourage you not to discuss functionality in other software, but to propose what you would like to see added to Blender and how.

Thanks.

Sorry, We just want to know from you what awaits animations in the future for blender? Can you tell us what we can expect in the future? You are welcome

Yes, I agree with that.

The best places for keeping an eye on Blender developments are:

This is off-topic for this forum. There’s a big blue banner on the top of every page that says this is not the place for feature requests:

For following what’s going on with the Animation & Rigging module, check Animation & Rigging on developer.blender.org and of course the meeting notes posted in Animation & Rigging - Blender Developer Talk.

I’ll close this thread now, as it’s indeed much off-topic for this forum. If you want to discuss this decision, PM me.

2 Likes