Potential hobbyist designer with a few questions

So some background information, traditionally I'm a programmer but back in January my school got Adobe CC for all their students and I started playing around with vector graphics in illustrator. I got busy during the semester but this summer I started looking into game dev and I started to realize doing 3d modeling and animation looked really fun as well. I'm by no means considering a career in design or anything like that but I'm considering getting into it as a hobbyist. I've been watching some tutorials from the blender guru. This morning I found this subreddit and I became really interested in Voxel animations and also animations like this one: https://www.reddit.com/r/Design/comments/208e9i/tried_my_hand_at_making_an_animated_guitar_gif/

At this point I'm not sure whether I find 3D modeling in blender to be the most interesting or stuff like the one I linked or Voxel stuff or maybe even other kinds of design that I don't even know about. I just know that the creative side in my is really fascinated by all this stuff and I could see myself doing it as a hobby and potentially incorporating it into my websites, apps, games that I program, etc. I'm thinking of trying all of these softwares and design styles out and seeing what I want to start with. I saw some YouTube tutorials on Photoshop Animation and they used a drawing tablet. Do I need something like a Surface Pro or a Wacom? If I don't need it would it be very useful? Is a Surface Pro a good option because of the pen input or are their much better options like an iPad Pro? What type of design styles (any that I've mentioned?) would benefit from the pen/stylus input? Thanks! Oh and also, I have my gaming PC with an i7 and GTX 1080 so if I design something on the Surface Pro (which is obviously not as powerful) I could move it over to the desktop for rendering and other intensive processes. Or is the stylus input only useful / necessary for digital illustration?

Great design resource

100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People (Voices That Matter) Submitted June 16, 2018 at 01:35PM by bigced97 https://ift.tt/2JSUezl