blender is a tried and tested software for many things especially animated movies, they used it to make, tv shows like maya and the three, next gen, the man in the high castle, westworld and more. while its not the industry standard for making movies and animation it has proved its self to be equally capable as the top applications for animation like maya and 3ds max, simply because it has all the features that are necessary for making animations and we are going to look at them here, so that you can be well prepared and ready to make your first blender animated movie.

am not just going to list obvious stuff like script writing or modeling, i want to dive into the more overlooked stuff that you rarely hear about but are totally necessary for making animated movies in blender or in any other application.

At this stage, you should already have a script, and now it’s time to bring your story to life. You have a vision of how everything should look in your head, but it’s not very useful there. So, let’s grab a pen and paper and start turning your vision into drawings. If paper feels too medieval for you, Blender offers a complete 2D drawing interface that can be used for this. It’s one of the most popular features of Blender, widely used by 2D artists. In fact, entire animated movies can be created right here.

if you are not going to previz your script first, it is a good idea to spend sometime creating storyboarding your animation here, previz is like a more advanced version of story boarding where instead of drawing the story out on paper, you create the story as a low poly low detailed 3d animation from start to finish, this is usually more time consuming as it requires you to make models and animate them, there are programs and addons that can help you with previz and storyboarding like the Storyliner addon, which lets you draw your ideas, in the viewport, and in different angles, storyline makes it easy to make simple shapes to get your vision, timing right before you commit to anything which will save you alot of frustration.

at the story boarding stage is likely where you will start your character design process, and prepare reference images for the character modeling process, if you are great at 2d drawing, you will have to make orthographic drawings of your characters from the front, side, and back, lining everything up, so that the 3d artist can use them as guides when creating the actual 3d model, while some artists can model characters without these images, having these reference images can speed up the modeling process.

you may also have to draw other objects like main objects that will be featured through out your animation, obviously the level of detail is going to depend on the amount of time you have or want to spend on each stage of your movie.

if you are working alone or a small team, spending a few dollars on some assets can save you days, for example instead of making every model from scratch, a collection of adjustable base meshes can be a significant time saver for you, this one comes with different designs that are rigged and can be customized to fit the designs you made in your storyboad process, its just 5$ and its going to save you hundreds of hours.

when you have your base meshes its time to add detail to them, you can do that by modeling but most artists prefer sculpting, it just gives you more freedom to add detail, especially for creatures, blender at the beginning of the year added a vdm brushes in sculpting which let you use 3d brush strokes on your sculpts and artists have gone wild with it, instead of sculpting everything from scratch, you can now leverage what others have add detail to your sculpts, before this feature, you if you wanted to add scale details like scales or horns, you would have to sculpt them directly or use 2d brushes that only create flat bumps instead of extruded details, if you want to speed up sculpting, this collection by vk game dev has 600 brushes, including ornaments, brushes, hones, scales, skin detail, cloth detail, wood marking and more.

Unfortunately, most of the time when you sculpt models, you have to retopologize them as well. The reason for this is that sculpting requires you to subdivide your mesh, and the finer the detail you add through sculpting, the more subdivisions your mesh will need. However, this comes at a cost. Animating and working with highly subdivided meshes is taxing on any computer. It will also be difficult to UV unwrap, texture, and rig, and if you have more than one highly subdivided model, your viewport will likely become laggy. Retopology essentially involves creating a low-poly version of the model, onto which the high-detail sculpt is transferred using a process called baking. Addons like RetopoFlow make creating these low-poly versions much easier.

some detail like clothing and hair is impossible to model or sculpt especially if you want them to look realistic or behave in a realistic physically accurate way.

stylized hair is the easiest to make, it renders faster and for animation you can rig it with an addon like swingy bone physics its a bone chain physics solver that will deform your hair and make it collide, swing and behave like actual hair, its a technique used in games alot and can be used on clothes if you dont want to make a full cloth simulation, obviously this has some limitations like it does not work on individual hair strands, but most animated movies use stylized hair anyway so it may not matter for you, there tools dedicated to make stylized hair like this anime hair maker, you control over the hair strand design, you can make it braided, curl, and add more detail, obviously you can make your own custom hair maker from scratch using geometry nodes but tools like this are meant to spare you the headache.

you can also try hair cards, they are just a mesh thats designed and textured to look like real hair, hair cards render faster and are easy to use, you just place it on your characters head, its basically a wig, if it does not fit, you can sculpt it or pull vertices to make it fit and meta studio has a collection of different hair cards that can be used in game engines as well.

if you want more detail in your hair, vfx grace made an addon for there studio called hair shape key that they use for all kinds of animals to make realistic dynamic far and hair, that can be simulated using physics.

as you can see creating characters for your movies is going to be the most time consuming task in this process, you still have to make clothes, you need to setup a rig, accessories, uv unwrap, setup a skin shader, texture the clothes and animate, these are all tasks that take hours to accomplish, there are tools and addons that can make these steps faster but still its going to take you some time.

most of the time, what experienced artists do is, they make the main characters them selves so that they are unique and then use libraries, there artists out there who have made hundreds of rigged characters that can be customized to fit your style, most of them have some basic animations, clothing and materials like this family collection by threedee studio the pack comes with adults, kids, elderly and pets, its enough for most animations.

Animating characters requires more than a rig, facial expressions are animated using a combination of shape keys and bones, shape keys is when you deform a mesh into different poses or shapes and save them, muscles stretch and fold differently when we are shouting, talking, or making funny faces, bones and rigs are not enough to capture these expressions and detail, fortunately making shape keys in blender is quick and easy and requires no addon to setup, its used in lip sinking quite often and is very important to create exaugurated facial expressions.

speaking of facial expressions, there is an addon that makes it easy to capture your face movement and generate shape keys for your character in Realtime, this can transform the whole animation process into something even fan making it feel less like work and more fan, you don’t have to do this for every characters, you can record for on character and transfer the shape keys to another in a few clicks,

the next stage is setting up the environment, most animated movies have inside and outside scenes, interior scenes are simple to make and faster to render, all you need are some walls and furniture to set you up, its the lighting that can make them a bit tricky so having some light gobos to create interesting shadows can be great, light gobos are just shadow textures placed infront of lights, though in blender, the texture can be fed directly into the light, they make the scene look richer, more detail and depth and adds more contrast to the scene, if they are animated it can make the scene look more alive and your world larger than what is visible on screen.

the truth is you likely have what it takes to make an animated movie, where most artists fail is judging the amount of effort it takes, they mostly under estimate the work load and choose less effective workflows, if you choose the right tools, collect a bunch of assets that you can even use on other projects, you will be one step ahead of most artists.

before you commit on making anything, first look for a procedural alternative to what you want, like this geometry nodes architectural pack, can be a project saver for alot of projects, it can make bridges, buildings, cities, castles and more, things that you likely would need in an animated movie.

there is also auto building, a procedural building generator, when you save time, you have more momentum, more energy to work on other parts of your animation, spend most of the time on making the characters rather than modeling buildings from scratch, unless the building is going to be featured heavyily in your animation, and even then you can start with a procedural building and add custom parts by hand to make it more unique, this is what most studios do, they start with a tool that can create hundreds of unique instances of an object, character, or building, and then they add a layer of handcrafted detail to make it unique, this saves you alot of time and energy

another area you should let addons handle are environments, especially the sky, they do it better anyways, they automate day and night time cycles, add moving clouds, stars, cloud shadows, atmospheric fog and more, they are also designed to be physically accurate to create the most realistic detail, most animated movies still use realistic skies so tools like Physical Starlight And Atmosphere can be used for animation and realistic renders.

making animated movies takes alot, but if you look very carefully you will see that most of the work has been done for you, all you have to do, is place the lego bricks in the right spots, sprinkle on your own imagination and detail and you will have an animated movie in no time.