Hi Drew, I'm also new to 3D modelling and animation. I have found Anim8or to be quite powerful and relatively easy to use.
Here is some things I have learnt:
1. Read the manual, it helps a great deal. Print it out if you can.
2. Anim8or can handle some advanced features using
ART or
Anim8or Ray Tracer, if you intend to use advanced effects like real reflections and transparency (glass type), you will need to understand how ART works, which basically involves using attributes. You can read about ART
here But in brief to use ART, you need to set it as the renderer, and for every material that you want to add advanced effects you have to add Attributes. eg Attribute
Specular, with string value
reflection.
3. Rendering: ie creating the final output movie or image, can take a lot of time depending on a number of factors like complexity of scene, ART effects etc. For movies it can take hours (sometimes days) to create the final video file , so understand that when first learning creating your animations. This is not just something that happens with Anim8or, the Blender movie
Elephants Dream took a whopping 125 days to render on a supercomputer!
4. There are different ways to achieve the desired result, lathing, extruding, splines, box modelling, etc.. The trick is to know as many as you can and use the one that will work the quickest/best!
5. You might want to check out Cyberdog's
Anim8or page, its quite useful.
