Hey Guys, this is an overall guide to learning animation in the style that I make it.

It is hard to give an exact roadmap, as different people want to make different types of things -

but if you’re interested in my style and what I make, heres exactly what I did:

(if you want to ask me any questions about blender or learning art check our discord!

https://discord.gg/2Cm6XX76Sm )

1. Firstly you should learn to draw & paint (moreso for character related work, if you only

want to make environment animations then you don't need this as much - but it will still

help you’re observation skills massively). Here are some resources and tips:

○ Manga materials - I would highly recommend signing up for her patreon, its the

best quality learning material out there. She also has an instagram where she posts

a small fraction of the tips she puts on her patreon

https://www.instagram.com/manga_materials_en/

○ You have to draw and paint from reference. You can go on pinterest or any other

site and practice painting from reference. START WITH PRACTICING FROM

REALISTIC IMAGES, And then later you can practice anime style. If you do it

the other way around you won’t have any understanding of why things are placed

the way they are.

○ One thing that really leveled up my skill was doing master studies of 19th century

academic painters like William-Adolphe Bougureau

 ○ Always look at the work of other artists to see why the quality of what they make

is good. Compare it to your own work. You’ll notice there's certain patterns in

painting faces, such as how the upper lip is darker than the lower lip, highlights

are always placed in certain places, etc.

2. You should learn to model - this will be pretty fun!

○ The first tutorial I ever watched for blender is this one by Imphenzia. I

recommend this tutorial a lot!: Learn Low Poly Modeling in Blender 2.9 / 2.8

○ You have to learn how to work with shaders. To be honest I learned this through

doing courses on cgcookie and constantly making multiple projects, and after a

while I just knew how to use the shader editor from being exposed to it so much.

(cgcookie recently changed their model to be pay annually only rather than

monthly, so idk If i really recommend them anymore -_-). That being said you

could just learn it for free on youtube, try typing in “Blender shader editor

tutorial” or something like that. I haven’t watched any myself so I can’t

recommend you a specific one but CGMatter or Default Cube is a decent channel.

○ Projects, projects, and more projects. Make whatever you’re interested in! My

recommendation is ALWAYS USE A BUNCH OF REFERENCE. Have a

reference board of the most beautiful things of whatever you’re making are that

you can find (use pinterest). If you’re making a tree for example, gather images of

really nice looking trees and reference it while modeling/texturing in blender, this

way whatever you make will have a better chance at being perceived as “good”

○ Now for making characters and sculpting the face - this is something that will take

a good amount of practice, especially the face. Your time that you practiced
 drawing will help you a lot here. Theres a million different timelapses on youtube,

you can copy their steps and gradually you’ll learn. Use this channel: SpeedChar -

YouTube hes very experienced and has a ton of free tutorials teaching you exactly

what to do.

○ After you can model, you can make yourself a character. I use toon shading for

everything since my style is anime. Since it is in anime style, making the outfit

isn’t much of a headache since we don’t have to worry about making normal

maps and roughness maps and blah blah blah.

3. Learn to rig & animate (Once again this is more for if you’re doing character related

stuff, if you’re doing environment or food you don’t need to really practice animation or

rigging that much)

○ So p2design has a good course on rigging. It’s a grind but worth it. Theres also

plenty of free resources on youtube.

○ For animation the way I do it is I don’t spline at all. Meaning everything is just

using constant interpolation in blender - if I make 5 different frames with different

poses, those 5 different frames will be whats exported - theres no easing in

between frames. This makes it very similar to 2d animation, where everything is

just frame by frame, and there is no interpolation.

○ LEARN TO USE THE GRAPH EDITOR. You can just look up a youtube tutorial

for this. The graph editor is your best friend while animating because it lets you

change everything so easily on the fly. Like if the character’s jump is too low you

can just change the z location on the graph at once to make it higher.
 ○ Now HERES WHERE YOUR ILLUSTRATION skill comes into play. After you

finish all your poses and animating, you export all the cels as a png/jpeg file. Put

them into whatever 2d animation software you use (I use clipstudiopaint). Now

you can draw over each individual frame, which is how I get my works to look so

2d. Even though it has cel shading, the unfortunate reality with 3d is without any

2D input I don’t think it’ll ever be on the same level. Using my method you get

the best of both worlds, the flexibility of 3D with the illustration quality of 2D.

4. That is basically it. Animation is a very broad subject so it’s hard for me to give you an

exact step by step roadmap, but this is generally what I’d do if I was starting over again!

And don’t hesitate to reach out to me if you have questions.

Update: After