I want to start an animated short using Stonehearth as the world it’s set in.
I know I’m going to need Qubicle Home or Master version to transfers files over into another program for rendering and animation. I will wait on buying any Qubicle programs. Because I know Qubicle and Radiant Entertainment are working something out for us.
Can I use a program like Blender. For animating and rendering my files?
Will learning Lua help in away with this? What program can I use to write and compile Lua programs?
What programs would you guys recommend and what other advice can you share?
Thanks in advance.
If what you will do is just export and animate, blender should do. Not sure about blender’s render capability but that should work, i do not think knowing lua will be a necessity, but maybe to find the various idles and animations ingame? maybe.
Yeah, I wanted to use Lua programs. Like a short cut to animation. Instead of doing everything frame by frame (which can take hours) I wanted to just program a few moves in. Like running jumping and other moves. If Blender is not the best then what is?
if you simply want to build and animate a model, Lua really wont be of any use to you… however, i encourage you to take a look at the language, because… well, the world needs more coders… 
https://code.google.com/p/luaforwindows/
I thought that what they where using, lua for the modding and programming for the game?
yes, they are… but Lua wont be of any help at this point (that i can see) as you arent actually implementing your animated models into the game…
at this stage @Skull24 would really just need to get a feel for qubicle and whatever tool he can use to animate the models… 
I still want to learn lua. I had an idea once the game comes out. I could just put in my lua and hit a few keys here and there and use FRAPS to record what I need. Then go in to another program to add a few missing things. I think that the best and quicks way to do things.