My son is in is early teens and dreams of working for Pixar! He is great with a pencil but I know I need to get him into computer animation early. Our budget is super tight, so I need help with the minimum hardware requirements he needs. What would be the cheapest desktop to buy him? Ive heard i5 processor, at least 6gb of ram and a decent monitor. What do you guys think? Thanks!
The different software programs, you could get, have different computer requirements. Narrow down the list of programs that will be running and check their requirements.
There are some free and very low cost programs out there. Blender is the only 3D program, that I can think of, that is free. Also there are low cost paint programs, which I can not remember titles of.
If you are having problems finding these titles, come back and drop a post here.
Keep drawing.
As an person who just started out 3d modeling I tried Blender, but it was a bit too complicated for a beginner as myself and my models of heads and bodies looked like I had no knowledge in anatomy itself...
Then I tried Sculptris(Same company that produced ZBrush), the result was very different, in fact it only took me around 10mins to get a good head going.
The thing is, in Blender you have to search how to do things such as mirroring the object(Sculptris does this simple), subdivide, change material, smooth things out, and etc. Meanwhile, Sculptris has a simple interface for beginners, it so easy to get the hang of it.
Blender is an awesome program though, it can animate while Sculptris cannot, it can do a lot of things(Though complicated knowing how to do so), It's a powerful open-source program, it's able to produce high-quality animations like you see in some 2000s animated movies. Though the only fallback is that it's rendering process is slow and can crash a modern regular-use computer.
You can probably model in Sculptris, and transfer your models to Blender to animate, I would say(As long as they are in .obj format).
But anyways, that's just my simple opinion.
Other 3d Programs that you may or not have to pay for are:
3ds Max
Bryce
ZBrush
Cinema4d
Maya
Poser
Seamless3d