Do You Need A 3D Animation ?

byHelen123

2K followers

Updated 5 years ago

Have you seen those awesome animation programmes out there? I have been eyeing them up for a while now.

I did do a white board animation a while back but wasn't much impressed with my performance and in the past I have used Fiverr and got someone to use my picture board and commentary to design me a info video but this also has never been so great, the last one I got done the guy didn't follow exactly what I had asked for, so it took a while to get it how I wanted it to be.... I had given specific instructions and had said I didn't want deviation from the pictureboard, but he did, then at the end when I gave feedback, he called me 'difficult" !

So, not a great experience and it cost me in the region of $60 - I had gone upmarket a little, I liked his graphics and so was not expecting this level of stress, plus it took over a week to get things right.

I decided that I wasn't going to do that this time and would spend the day (today) trying things out - usually I am way too busy to allow myself a day to fiddle with things, I'm normally so short of time, with all the travelling and not much wifi so have to press on with the programme and not indulge myself... but I thought, one day, if it doesn't work out, I'll go onto Fiverr tomorrow and find someone to do a 3d animation for me.

Well... I was on my way to Toonley which I had seen advertised on Facebook but knew it had distint limitations in that many of their characters are static and this can be frustrating if theyre the very ones that are in your niche. So thought I'd do a bit of googling and see what else there is, Toonly is expensive and I didnt want to get sucked in to spending more than i would on Fiverr.

Well..... Google brought up Renderforest... new to me, but I had a saunter around, liked the animations, the editing, you don't download any programmes to your laptop, and so decided to give it a go.....

I was very pleasantly surprised.... Really great graphics, which you can change to 3d, 2d, textured, wavy..... change the colours to suit your website, add music or voice over.

So I set about writing narration about........... SEO (yay!) - exactly what I wanted to say, then trawled through all the 3d images there are, which is a LOT... I chose each scene to represent my story..... Now most scenes were about 5s, some were longer, but you can alter this time if you want, which I did once I got to the voice over section because some of my chattering was slightly longer than 5s.

I came unstuck a bit here though, but I think it was more my macbook misbehaving than Renderforest... I couldn't get the microphone to work, I don't have an external microphone so was relying on my internal one, thinking about it now, it might have been my browser - I use safari and frequently things don't work as well as they should. But not to be disheartened, I went online and found a free online voiceover - www.online-voice-recorder.com - brilliant !

The online voiceover programme was so easy... say what you want, then move the start/finish line about so I could chop it to fit more with the length of the 3d image.

The voiceover saved and downloaded as an mp3 which was simple to import into the 3d animation platform against each scene - simple !

It has taken me most of today to get it absolutely perfect, I had to fiddle with a few starts and finishes of the voiceovers, giving a little more time after I had finished speaking but it was simply really getting used to how the recording worked.

But got to say I am impressed ! I have added it to my youtube account and embedded the code into my blog... 😁 Really pleased!

It has taken me, I would think, probably about 6 hours but as I am a very impatient person that's way sooner than I would have gotten it from anyone on Fiverr and its cost me $45.

When I first started out, I found understanding search engine optimising confusing, so the blog I have written for my SAC website, has the inclusion of this short video and diagrams and graphs made in illustrator... so not to 'toot my own trumpet' too loudly, I am really pleased with my efforts today.