Hello everyone, I'm not very knowledgable of animation so forgive me if this question is insane or another peice of string.

Lets assume you wanted to make a 3D show. A full season of 12 30min episodes you would release weekly. All the art is finished, characters, weapons, environments, etc. How long would it take to animate? (Assuming render time is not a factor?)

I know there are a million other factors that go into play so I'll try to narrow it down. You'd be making a 30min episode with maybe 3 - 5 main characters in one environment for its duration and it would be sorta sci-fi/fantasy, with fighting,magic, etc. Could this be done in less than a year, assuming you just had to animate?

general idea:

Have you heard of machinima before? By using game engines to handle rendering, scripting, and animation, it allows individuals or small groups to create computer-rendered videos for short films. Valve recently released Source Filmmaker which is a new set of tools around this idea - and many other developers (such as Bungie and Unreal) have provided in-game or standalone tools for machinima makers.

If you are only one person who already knows how to model characters,animate,rig,compose and direct a scene it will take you about this time:

a main character 6 hours - 1 day

rigging a character 2 hours - 8 hours

a scene with props 1 day - 2 days

rig scene 30 min - 1 hour

background person 1 hour - 2 hours

rigging back character 10 min - 20 min

animation 1 day - 2 days

composing and FX 4 hours - 1 day

First is modeling, then rigging, followed by animating and then composing during rendering and after.

A 15 min film with 4 characters and 3 locations, will take around a week to produce.

You will also need voice actors and a script.

If you want high quality you will need good artist, it still takes about the same time.

Edit:

Followup episodes will take about the same time as you build a library of props, but will need to add more for deferent things.