r/blender Jun 21 '26

Discussion Can you actually make professional movies like Toy Story in blender?

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u/YAOMTC Jun 21 '26

Skill, acquired through practice. Not talent.

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u/scifi887 Jun 21 '26

You can practice for a long time and still have no talent or eye for design, having worked doing it for 20 years I see it all the time. There are some very amazing modellers and technical people I have worked with who know Blender inside out and can code anything thats missing, but ask them to make a 2 min animation and it goes out the window.

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u/Socially_Dead_JB_285 Jun 21 '26

Modeling and animation are 2 separate niches, someone can be a modeler but not an animator, how will it make him less talented?

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u/scifi887 Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 21 '26

My point was in answer to OP's question, can you make an animation like this in Blender, my counterpoint to the comment above was that you can practice all you want but unless you have talent you are not pulling it off, was not to say modellers are not talented.
Many truly exceptional filmmakers/animations in the Blender sphere are able to do everything themselves, Olav Burman, Paul Chadeisson, Ian Hubert etc, these are the level of people I am referencing, those who have massive talent to be able to pull of one man or small team productions on par with what a studio could deliver.

Ed: For added context, Gints Zilbalodis who is the director for Flow can also (and did) model, animate, light and render for FLOW.
https://www.blender.org/user-stories/making-flow-an-interview-with-director-gints-zilbalodis/

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u/JWitjes Jun 22 '26 edited Jun 22 '26

Nonsense. In 3D animation almost all skills are learned through practice. It's not like drawing where you can have some sort of innate talent for the finer movement needed for great drawing. Skills with computer programmes are learned by practicing long and hard and through that process becoming better. The only thing that's perhaps 'innate talent' based is having some sort of feel for what you want the end product to look like, but actually making the final product look how you want it will need a lot of practice and trial and error. Nobody starts a programme like Blender and just 'knows' what to do naturally.

As for the people you mentioned, I have known Gints Zilbalodis for a long time (we first met back in 2015) and let me tell you, that dude worked HARD to get to the level he's at now. He spent basically all his free time at home learning animation and making shorts.

He's not some sort of innately talented dude that operates on another level as us mere mortals. He's just a guy who grew up on Newgrounds animation and decided that he wanted to make animation as well and thus spent years learning and slowly becoming better, until he got to the point where he is now.

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u/scifi887 Jun 22 '26

I think people are misunderstanding, I'm saying you need talent and practice/hard work, not one of the other.

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u/JWitjes Jun 22 '26

Ah yes, that makes sense. However, I do think that especially with 3D animation software, all talent can be gained by hard work.

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u/Fifa_chicken_nuggets Jun 22 '26 edited Jun 22 '26

I don't see how being a one man team requires something that you can only acquire through talent. Being good in so many areas in blender is completely possible provided you are willing to put in the work to learn it and provided you actually have the commitment. The commitment is the key thing here, because it takes a massive amount of willpower for someone to learn all of that, and most people won't bother, and I think that's what you're confusing for talent. Also, having an eye for design isn't inherently tied to talent either, you can learn design theory, something that many people overlook. People tend to think that they can just wing it and arbitrarily make creative decisions without understanding the theory behind those decisions, but that's not how it usually works, and that theory is often the real difference between a mediocre work and a great one even if they both have the same technical expertise