All of those 3d animation & effects programs cost a small fortune. It’s supposed to be a bit nicer to use than Maya or 3ds Max though.
I worked for a few weeks at an animation studio helping with some production stuff- being one of the lower level artists is a pretty tedious job. They don’t really get to do much creative, someone else creates the models of the characters and they just spend hours painstakingly setting them up and moving or modifying them to match the story board, hit render, then 20 minutes later or (actually often overnight once you start getting multiple characters, textures, lighting etc) discover that something’s a bit wrong and have to do it all over again. One of the people who worked there pretty much spent all day every day putting snow and rain on things.
While I was there they were making a tv ad for some phone company in Canada. They’d given us some pre-made models of animals like racoons and bears, and the script. Whoever had made the animals hadn’t quite done it right though, because their eyes went weird sometimes when you moved the heads. So lots of frustrated animators swearing at “that fucking cross-eyed racoon” all day. Then when they got it looking good, the company said they liked it, but would like some more cheerful lighting to make it look more like a sunny winter day. There was a whole day of fiddling with the lighting that made it accidentally look more and more tropical before they hit on the right lighting colours and arrangement.
I spent that time having to make an animation of a fake golf game that would appear on one of the phone screens, because apparently they weren’t allowed to use footage from the real golf game they’d planned any more.
