ok so as the title suggests
Is there anything cheaper than Maya out there to show me the ropes of animation (and do we really need to use something as heavy as Maya???)
I ask simply because my pay comes no where near the $250 PER MONTH??? O.o (approx £180) - and i doubt a month trial will barely let me scratch the surface
For animating stonehearth I guess? Curious aswell what someone could use
What about Blender? It’s free, very powerful and reportedly more stable than Maya. Only downside might be getting used to the UI.
Just found the same answer myself on this forum, may have to give that a try some day
Do it! It’s a lot of fun. Only other downside that I forgot to mention: it’s also a timesink. But that’s because it’s fun.
whistle maya trial with fakeemailgenerator whistle
we went through this on discord @Wiese2007but as far as never trying either prog before… blender looks to be (going by reviews and youtube) a lot more… coded nub freindly to use 
Cheers guys… i will try blender
besides… as i also said… i cant just keep creating account after account after acount each month ;P… 
wonder why the devs promote Maya to gamers on here… considering half? of us are neither working or only get SSI and who cant afford it 
Well, without promoting any specific kind of behavior, let’s say gamers are usually resourceful.
As far as I know Maya has been the industry standard for animation for at long time. 3DS Max i probably second. I think they have student licenses for both (free as long as it’s not for commercial use). Don’t know if it works outside of the U.S. though.
Out of the free programs Blender is the one closest to those two. I have tried it but didn’t get very far. Probably because I was expecting things to work like 3DS Max. I’ve seen someone describe it like you need to know a couple of very important hotkeys to get going, so you should probably look that up before you get too discouraged.
I think one of the voxel modelling programs that’s been suggested around here have animation support. Not sure about the name. Not Qubicle or Magicavoxel.
And no I’m not an animator. I’ve just been playing around with 3DS Max a lot a few years back.
Good luck! 
**please note - you must have a US billing address to complete purchase **
this is the standard for most software (UK and US in this sense, are non transferable… and UK laws being a student says you HAVE to be a student)
why… whatever could you mean?
but yes, i will have a go at blender and check my… resources library
thanks guys, i guess this could be seen as solved?
Sorry but, where have you seen that? Nobody is promoting any specific software here. People might explain which software the dev team uses, but most modders use free software, because there’s no need to purchase anything else to mod Stonehearth.
For animation, you must have missed the biggest thread : Stonehearth Add-On for Blender (Animation)
Something more recent: Symbol's Animation Tutorial for StoneHearth
The download for the addon: http://forum.minddesk.com/t/blender-add-on-example-based-on-stonehearth/40
i appologise… i was given a link by a few other players and i just assumed… i meant nothing by it
Hey @Unreal_Gam3er - just wanted to weigh in. Here on the Stonehearth team we do use Maya, and while it is powerful, it does take some getting used to. It also costs a substantial amount of money, though there are student licenses (free) and I believe they recently started doing some sort of subscription model (not 100% about that though). I have been very lucky to have a job in the industry where my work can afford products like this, so I haven’t needed to purchase something for my personal use. (I have bought programs like 3DCoat and ZBrush, but those are more high-res asset creation workflows - not for animations).
We used to use 3dsMax here, but it had some pretty large animation related bugs and were preventing us from doing… anything : /. Not sure if those have been fixed by now, but since we made the transition to Maya there is no reason to go back.
As for Modders, I have heard good things about Blender - in fact I believe there is an animation exporter for Stonehearth somewhere on the internet. I’m sorry I don’t have more information on that : /. I tried to use Blender myself, but couldn’t get past the controls and ended up just retreating back to Maya. But I have a friend who works in the industry and he swears by Blender. Also says they update it constantly with really awesome features (but he only uses it for modeling).
Hopefully there is some helpful info in there.
I have several scripts which I wrote for Maya to export animations for our game (and to construct rigs and help with animating and what not), but I’m still waiting to hear back about permission on being able to give those out. I will poke the bear again and see if I can’t get an answer out of them.
thank you for that @malley i appreciate your reply… appart from getting stuck every now and then (when one would - dealing with code)
The only issue i seem to have currently is with how exactly the lua works (as i understand it… the lua - if the .json is the skin and the mixinto’s and etc are the blood - would be the bones… ) so with that in mind… the lua is the thing that holds it all together… Its just that for E.g
or is that something different?
(i know it looks like im trying to fly before i can walk - but… i already kinda get the combat 1h xxx and etc after a few days of looking at it )
Heh, I don’t really understand Lua myself, but if you have a specific question I can try to help.
For general ‘how to mod’ stuff I would suggest checking out Relyss’ modding guide on Steam: Stonehearth’s Modding Guide
But in general I’d say to try to avoid lua changes for the time being. You should be able to mess around with a LOT of stuff before needing to change/add lua files : ).