Learning Things I Don’t Want to Learn but Need to Learn Anyway (Maybe)

I recently completed an animation course in Blender. I have no plans to use Blender animations in my games.

My Blender learning journey has been one so far focused on modeling, shading, and UV texturing. Soon I’m going to start sculpting. All of these focuses are applicable to the game-making journey I’m traveling right now. But animation…well, I’m either building a game that doesn’t use animations or, more likely, I’m avoiding making a game that uses animations because animations are effing intimidating.

I have some history with animation. In college, I created a Flash cartoon series called The Thirsty Gerbil Super Things (check out this one episode that still survives), recently I completed a short Unity animation course (focused on the Mecanim system), and even more recently I completed an animation section in a very popular 3D modeling course. What I’ve learned from the latest Unity and Blender courses is that animation is really hard and when something goes wrong, knowing how to fix it is pretty hard. Usually I have to start over.

I know that learning animation in Unity is going to be very important eventually (and is probably very important now, but again, I’m fighting hard to avoid having to actually master animation).

But how exactly does animating in Blender relate to animating in Unity? I don’t know. The Blender animation course that I recently took doesn’t describe how to get Blender animations into Unity, meaning my practical use for the learnings is far removed.

So why not just skip the animation section? Because I’m afraid that without taking the course in the proper order I’ll miss the required knowledge for advancing through future courses. Also, if I skipped the animation course, I will have missed out on creating the very cool animation above.

So, to summarize:

1. I know learning animation is important
2. I’m intimidated by learning animation, so I’m avoiding it as much as possible
3. I have no practical use in mind for animation, which supports my aversion
4. Looked forward to a future devlog where I inevitably dismiss animation as “super easy”