If you are going to make similar animation, aka very customized, stick to SFM or Blender. Daz doesn't have a proper animation pipeline, you usually just use animations after importing them from Blender.
I'll suggest Blender if you want to
A huge deciding factor between SFM and Blender is, how long do you want animations to take. I don't mean, how long you want to make your animations, I mean, how long do you want to be sitting there doing nohing while your computer is cranking out renders.
SFM has two main advantages over Blender:
- Source Engine Graphics
- Dedicated Animation Pipeline
All SFM animations tend to look the same because they have the same rendering engine. This isn't a bad thing though.
- Is you never have to worry about spending too much time perfecting the visuals because there's not too much you can do,
- The visuals are good enough for most,
- It renders pretty quickly, Almost no down time to render and export an animation.
I can't say too much about the animation pipeline, but from what I've seen, it does have some pretty neat features to help with common animation problems and is relatively streamlined, so you may want to start with SFM if you want an easier learning experience, simply because it is quicker to get started with.
Blender hase 3 main advantages over SFM:
- Vastly more powerful graphics (has both a proper renderer in terms of light simulating, or a realtime render as well, with the ability to make custom shaders using graphical nodes).
- It can export data to various formats to work with other programs (I sculpt and animate daz characters in blender, make custom clothes in blender, and blender is used to make new and custom FBX characters for SFM)
- It can do anything.
The thing I want to point out is the last feature. With both artist you menitoned, I see four things:
All of these are only really achievable through blender, if you want to make their style of animation. The thing about blender is, I wouldn't say the software itself is complex, not any more that is (they've been doing a really good job with making blender much more user friendly). What makes Blender challenging to use is the same reason it is so powerful. Take Daz for example, this is a program with a few different character bodies, but you can highly customize it with morphs to make a character of a custom design. Daz will automatically fit clothes to your character's shape, and there is a library of assets, textures, poses and animations that you can get and easily add to your projects by simply clicking to add them to your character or scene. You are mostly clicking and using the tool, maybe fiddling with the shapes and poses, but your not really fiddling with the program itself. Blender however, has no streamline process, and it doesn't do anything automatic. Even some of the neat posing tools and features in SFM it doesn't have.
If blender doesn't have these features, why use it? Well, the reason I give the daz example, is SFM is similar to it, both are like a power tool. A power tool is really good at doing it's job... but only it's job. It's a nightmare and very tedious to try to pose and impossible to animate characters in Daz. Similarly it is a nightmare trying to shape characters in SFM and impossible to make new characters. So if they are power tools, what is Blender? Blender is more like a tool box, full of hand tools. Blender can actually do a lot of what both daz and sfm can do, including some of the automated behavior, but you have to do a lot of set up. For example, exporting a character from daz to blender, I have to overhaul the animation rig so that it includes a lot of the automatic features you would find with SFM. The reason Blender can be a hassle to learn is that you don't get to work right away with making animations, you have to start learning all these smaller steps inbetween zero to animation, and a lot of them have to deal with how to use the program, learning concepts like IK rigs, playing around with shaders that offer the best compromise between great looks and not taking forever to render. I'll only render in daz if I want to preview a character, but it takes a while, even if I lower the quality. Blender, not only do I get more control over the graphics, but if I'm doing an animation or any other work, I can usually get it to run much much faster.
In the case of GeneralButch, I think they started off with SFM, but eventually moved to Blender when SFM could no longer do the things they wanted, or could not do them to the quality they wanted (I've seen people do stretch physics with sfm, but the quality of the 3D model limits the quality of how this looks and works). Both artist are now using Blender. Learning blender means learning the fundamentals of 3D animations, so I'd actually recommend toying with Blender. You could start with SFM to have an easier time getting into projects, if you want to do simpler animations (lewd models found at smutbase's sister site
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), but since it automates some things, you'll be skipping learning some skills and concepts (and if you want jiggle physics, you have to animate it by hand a lot of the time with SFM).
starting from nothing, I starting Blender with the idea that I could make a custom character in a month, completly custom, while learning blender, having the character ready to animate. This is when I was in college and had more free time, but it still took me 3 months just to make something fairly polished and 'deliverable,' and much longer toying with it and causually watching videos to learn a lot of the tricks that can be used (to get the daz export model to have an automated animation rig like with SFM, I pretty much had to invent my own techniques since there is no one go to guide on how to do this).
Best of luck!