But I want to stick to the big and well-established professional packages, and among these, Lightwave is best place to learn 3D character work. Character animation can never be separated from character modeling, either technically or artistically. Of course, you must have models if you're going to animate, but there's more to it than that. The shape of a character and the way it moves must be considered together, and it's a creative pleasure to bounce back and forth between modeling and animating a figure. But at bottom, character animation is modeling.
Character animation is mesh deformation.
The body and features of the model are being edited in time. If we had all the time and patience in the world, we could do character animation by simply editing a model in a modeling program thousands of times to create thousands of models to morph between. The specialized tools of character animation are those that lets us edit our model easily over a sequence of frames. In this lesson, we'll build a simple organic figure in Lightwave and use a bones system to pose it, and therefore animate it. Lightwave MetaNURB modeling is a method of creating smooth curvature by subdividing a simpler polygon mesh.