Animation recommedations

I am looking at Bongo, VRay, and KeyShot for rendering and animation. Any other animations and rendering tools I should consider with Rhino? Or are these the top two?

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Those two are the most accesible options. The nice thing of Bongo is that runs inside rhino so you can see animation and modify your design live (for example for clearance of parts to avoid collisions). Also you can do a lot of animations in OpenGL/Realtime if that suits your needs, and have mixed display modes. We find that useful.

Hopefully Bongo 3 will also give us .fbx export to render those animations somewhere else too.

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If you need camera animations only and you like to render architecture scenes, than Enscape is a nice option too.

Do you think Bongo will be enough to do some basic cartoon like animation for toddlers?

I have another question, do people use Rhino to create characters and use Adobe Animate?

Some people also paint in MS Excel. That doesn’t make it a good tool to do it.

For character/cartoon animations you should look at something like Blender.

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Blender is indeed a powerful 3d animation suit. If you are new to the Blender world I’d go for the Blender 2.80 (and newer if you read this way in the future :wink: ). 2.80 revamps a lot of the UI and UX, going clearly workflow-centric. At this time it is still in Beta, but the response to filed bugs is very good, possibly fixed within hours and a new build probably on the same day (from the buildbot network).

For Blender 2.8 I have started an importer to get Rhino data into Blender, maintaining layers and such. So you could easily work your assets in Rhino, then import to Blender to animate. I even started a keymap and UI theme that resembles (somewhat) Rhino - at least viewport navigation should be very similar to Rhino. This should make the entry easier(-ish).

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FWIW, Yesterday I made a short animation for my Blender class I teach here in Turku, Finland. In about an hour I created from scratch:

I haven’t tried Bongo but I can recommend Grasshopper if you need to -move/modify- stuff and then render via Arctic mode or V-Ray / V-Ray for Grasshopper.