I’m just beginning to animate and I’m at a crossroads. From your expert, (or experienced) opinions, which platform is better for Animating?
Id say go with maya. Its animation tools are pretty well developed and its fairly easy to write more useful tools as you go.
Besides it has the ART from epic themselves which exists to help with rigging and animation for UE4 assets.
Why not Blender ?
Neither is bad. Personally, I like 3ds Max, but that’s because that’s the first tool I learned so I have the most experience with it.
If you have friends or mentors that use a particular tool, you absolutely want to use that tool, so you have an easier time getting questions answered!
Thanks for the responses, I also plan to use these for modelling as well, can anyone shed some light on that?
What do you mean having a landlord? Does Maya take royalties too?
Oh. subscription just killed all of my dreams. I’d rather not spend money when programs like Blender are available for free, and have a wide range of tools. I do have C4D and I have Blender, but im not sure which one would be optimal for UE4.
If given the two choices I would say 3ds Max only because I’ve been using 3ds Max for years. 
If your looking for a serious tool though hands down MotionBuilder is the twenty pound sludge hammer when it comes to managing animations but will still need a 3d host app.
Thanks for the resposne my choices are now Maya, Blender Or C4D.
Just to stick my two-pence in, I’ve used C4D for years now and have had nothing but trouble getting characters and animations to import properly into Unreal. The FBX export options are very limited, and no matter how I bake or structure hierarchies within C4D before export, when attempting to import into UE4 I just get import failures and errors concerning multiple roots etc. 3DSMax on the other hand I’ve had no problems with at all and transitioning my workflow from C4D to 3DSMax was pretty easy. In terms of learning curve, it’s halfway between C4D and Maya.
I like 3ds for assigning skins to skeletons and skeleton setup. Maya for creating models and animating.
I haven’t found anything in maya for rigging a true rigged body like a robot where your set your mesh components to be truly stuff too. If anyone know of you can select the bone then the object and make it full weight to just that bone I’d love to see it in action 
Heh most people are the opposite, I prefer modelling in Max then animation it’s pure maya for me. But it’s what I am used to and comfortable with. It all comes down to what you are used to, as it will be far quicker doing something in a package that you know rather than having to learn an entirely new package just for a touch of animation. If cost is a factor then its blender > maya > max (due to 'rental costs).
Yeah, despite artists loving to argue about their tools, all 3 have their own pros/cons.
I switched to Blender from 3ds Max back in 2011 and have since then format-shifted my entire asset library into .blend files. What convinced me in the end was the faster startup, Blender’s “Action Editor” (very neat, editable per-bone keyframe matrix view) and Rigify (it’s like 3ds Max “CAT” rigs, with modular limbs, spines, heads, faces, ropes and stuff you can add similar to mesh objects).
I’ve still got access to Maya, though, and wanted to take another look at that for rendering.
You’re certainly doing something wrong.
Even the advanced charater Rig of C4D can be imported into UE4 with just a small change in it’s hierarchy to get rid of the multi-root.
Max has a shiton of plugins, but I still like Maya the most.