During my first animation project I made quite a few mistakes, largely due to a lack of experience.

Animation, more than nearly anything I’ve done with Blender, has a lot of potential for a change here messing up more than you anticipated in the scene.

Yes, if you change a model that already has textures, there’s a good chance you’ll need to re-texture some of the model. It just seems that in animation, a change in a scene can have many more implications.

• Try not to have long uninterrupted animations
  • If your character animation is too long, changing things can become unwieldy.
  • Any change is more likely to break something in the scene.
  • If you have things broken up into distinct animations in the pose library and use tweening/interpolation, hopefully your changes can be better confined to a particular motion/action
• Try to use the pose library.
• Make sure, make sure, make sure your models are final.
  • Going from flats to heels? All your animations need to be thrown out and redone.
• Make sure you have time for reworks.
  • It really makes sense to do blocking or rough “clay mode” animations with relatively low poly assets
    • This gets the “Yes that’s what I wanted” from the customer before moving to more detailed assets and much slower editing and animation times.
• Save early, save often, and MAKE +1 NAMED copies as well.
  • The named copies will allow you to more easily go back to something when a change you initiated, and saved, didn’t work out the way you wanted.
  • If you have just a bunch of +1 copies, it can become quickly unweildy to go back to a particular change.
  • It’ll also save you from Blender crashes.
• On the Eevee front - be careful about bumping shadow cube size, cascade size, etc. too high.
  • You can quickly make eevee “low performant” and make even editing your scenes laggy
  • On indirect lighting there’s cubmap size, diffuse. . . understand what changing those sizes buys you, and be careful when you do change things.
• Back to animation. Even if it seems easier, don’t allow your character to “walk away” from whatever the root bone is. Or the x/y/z coordinate bone.
  • It may make “stepping” easier because the foot really doesn’t move, but it makes everything else much more difficult to manage.
  • That does mean that you’ll have to not just get your keyframes right, but play with your animation handles when your character is moving otherwise the foot will look like it’s sliding all around, but the trade-off is worth it!
  • It means you can use that pose library.
• Finally. . . sometimes it’s easier to simply hide a character and use a second instance of the character if you’ve messed up some of the above than to make the animation of the single instance of the character even longer.
• Oh, yeah, depending on what you’re doing and how you’re panning/scanning, if the timing of an animation changes be aware that you may also need to manipulate your camera, and possibly the other characters.

Resources

Final bit of Blender advice. . .

If you’re running on a laptop, and running sidecar, discord streaming, multiple copies of blender, trying to render, have 50+ browser tabs open be aware that you’re likely to run into a few issues here and there.

There’s a good chance that you’ll experience hangs and crashes that wouldn’t happen if Blender was the only thing running.