The idea of a 3D animation studio

The idea of a 3D animation studio is nothing new these days.
With the popularity that names like Pixar or Avatar see worldwide it shouldn’t be a surprise for anybody. In this article we’ve therefore decided to cover some aspects mainly related to software applications used by a 3D animation studio.

A 3D animation studio these days is based upon cutting edge, high-end performance computers featuring all the bells and whistles you can imagine. This usually means multi core processors, high-speed memories, huge capacity hard drives and big screen cinema displays. All these come accompanied by the latest and greatest industry standard software applications without which the computers alone would not value one single penny. Let’s dive a little in the software world of a 3D animation studio and see which are those applications and what are they able to do. The most popular applications you may encounter in a 3D animation studio are 3ds Max and Maya. Apart from these, Photoshop is not missing either and in the case of a studio oriented more towards architecture, there are also AutoCAD and Revit. We will stop a little on the first two.

3ds Max is an Autodesk product that can have many industry applications like movies, television, gaming, architecture and even medical. A 3D animation studio can use it to generate animations and special effects, to create environments and characters, to do photorealistic architectural walkthroughs or to generate human body simulations.

Maya is also an Autodesk product intensively used by 3D animation studios, but is more complex, more powerful and more expensive than 3ds Max. It is more oriented towards professional CG artists. Another difference that should be pointed out is that Maya is now available for the Mac OS X 64-bit operating system, while 3ds Max isn’t. It is worth to mention that both programs had been used in the making of Avatar, the James Cameron’s groundbreaking 3D Sci-Fi movie.

There are also other specialized software applications that a 3D animation studio can make use of. A very good example is Blender, an open source, cross-platform 3D content creation suite. It is very popular, it has a lot of features and for a small 3D animation studio might be a very good choice.

The 3D animation studio topic is a lot more complex than what we have seen in this article. We can say we’ve barley scratched its surface and therefore we encourage you to search the Internet for some more in-depth information.