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I am 100% new to animation. I work for a company, and have been asked to try and learn animation for training purposes. All we need is very simple animations. We do have very good looking 3D models of workers, our machines, and possibly the environment they work in as well. I just need to figure out how to pull them all together and start learning the animation part.

Is there any videos you guys know of that could help me out here? I appreciate it.

***NOTE: I am not interested in learning to make these models at this point. I would love to know how, but I want to try and learn how to animate these models as fast as possible to start pushing out new training material. Maybe one day if I get the time, I will try and learn the modeling side. I am having to work all overtime to learn this part, so right now I do not want to take on more than I have to.

Bblack
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    Welcome to BSE. Unfortunately this question is way to broad, as this site is about getting help with specific issues rather than providing a beginner's crash course or complete tutorials. Resources for Blender lists several good places to start. Googling for Blender tutorials is also a good option, and there are quite a lot of people who do video tutorials more or less regularly. –  Jan 23 '18 at 22:45
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    To bring them into blender, you'll have to import them. Add details about their format, sometime a specific addon is required to import less common ones. As o animate, that's matter for manuals, tutorials, more separate questions... – m.ardito Jan 23 '18 at 22:55

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Welcome!

As I get you correctly, you won't need to care about modeling and you will get a complete model with texture, normal/ambient occlusion map and so forth.

To check what task will still be up to you, you might check for common workflows:

Since I am also a beginner in Blender, I can't speak from much personal experience. Here I have put together some (free) tutorials that have helped me to make my first steps. (There are thousand of other really good tutorials out there on Youtube, just search for them! Also Blender.org, Udemy and other pages have good, but often paid tutorials)

  1. (!) You might still get your hands on some tutorials on basic modeling to deal with most likely upcoming problems! For example:

  2. Rigging: Most possibly your task starts with rigging your models for animation. It essentially adds controls to your objects for animation, and defines what and how something moves or deforms. For a perfect start into rigging go trough this series:

  3. Animation: Here you get a brief introduction into the concept of manually animating simple models.

  4. (?) Dynamics & Simulation: A start in rigid body simulations/animations as if you might want to make simple physic animations.

And always work with reference material for your animation!

Tip: If you need study material for movement of living beings, just search for "Muybridge" on Google Pictures!

  1. (?) Lighting, Rendering & Compositing I don't know if you want to render your animations in blender or bake & export them to other software, say a game engine. As I never used blender to render my animations, I do not have any repository of tutorials on that. But you might just check the Youtube Channels I mentioned as well as the following and might find some good tutorials for your needs:

3D Animation with Blender a complex topic and I hope, with this videos, you can get hold on a path for your journey.

kueblersimon
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