Animation software?

~vivsters Jun 18, 2012 Hobbyist General Artist

Hey guys, I'm just wondering if anyone knows a good software for animation, for a beginner. I don't need to animate anything fancy and 3D, but hopefully something better than frame-by-frame animation? Thanks!

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Devious Comments

~Redfoxbennaton Jun 28, 2012 Student Traditional Artist

Use pencil and flash animation. Always know what you are doing?

~defense2 Jun 23, 2012

I use Lightwave 3d... but that might be too advanced. Depending upon what it is you are trying to animate, you might want to try programs like poser... where by you are given pre-rigged characters.

Lightwave, will allow you to model, modify, rig, animate, and add special effects to your characters. But be warned... all rigging is painful as you must model very well and then create maps for the bones.... this can become even more painful as you create more complex characters and environments, such as matching speech to your characters mouth and creating morphs for the sounds made. Case in point each letter to a word having its own shape of the face and mouth.

but the reward for making such animations are equally great, more so when you want to sell an idea.

~vivsters Jun 25, 2012 Hobbyist General Artist

thanks for the info!!

i really don't have much experience with 3D modelling/animation programs.. however, i am very interested to learn how it works and how to do it myself. do you have any suggestions or websites that might help me?

thank you so much!!

~defense2 Jun 25, 2012

Youtube is your friend.

Google can help to find websites which specilize in 3d modeling such as the lightwave forums.

~wezenbeesje Jun 22, 2012 Professional General Artist

I use tvpaint for big animations.

~Radiant-Bantam Jun 19, 2012 Hobbyist General Artist

the open source world is full of animation programs though they all vary in ability required- am not very good with very complex software so cant judge how difficult they woud be for others [however they are all completely free,some of them have had blockbuster films and games made with them,and theyre all open source if remember correctly]:
synfig studio- [link]
ktoon- [link]
blender- [link]
K3D- [link]
GIMP GAP [gimp animation package] windows installer- [link]
stopmotion- [link] [sorry its linux only,but that can be easily arranged with something like WUBI which can be deleted easily enough].

~vivsters Jun 25, 2012 Hobbyist General Artist

Wow - thanks! This is very helpful information

~AlisaTheArtiste Jun 18, 2012 Hobbyist Digital Artist

Well you could try doink.com

It's very good for beginners and has many elements similar to Adobe Flash... I myself animate with Adobe Flash CS3 (a little old by now |D) but Doink can capture some things all the same. However, a little flaw is that it's frame-by-frame animation. Flash has this thing called tweening that helps a lot if you don't want to redraw everything over and over again, with a little learning and practice and use of symbols.

Another practice for beginners would be things like Adobe Photoshop or Gimp for animating gifs... but these are frame by frames and you gotta look up tutorials on how and all that. But they can animate icons so yup B) (But don't kill yourself; when animating gifs, only animate small things like blinking or small movements or icons or whatever pfft)

But if you want to REALLY get big with animation--AND programming then you can try a website called www.scratch.mit.edu

It's a website I've been on for years and it really helped me with animating even though it's slightly inconvenient to use. I still learned a lot though... with the help at looking at OTHER people's animations as well as just practicing on my own.

~vivsters Jun 19, 2012 Hobbyist General Artist

Thanks!

I know how to use Photoshop, but it's extremely tedious for any large scale animation..

What features does Flash include? (I have that as well).

~AlisaTheArtiste Jun 19, 2012 Hobbyist Digital Artist

Well if you draw something on a frame, select all of it, and right click and click on "convert to symbol" (set it to movie clip) and then click okay, you can do a lot of things with it. Make a keyframe on another frame like 10 frames away and move the symbol somewhere else... then go back to the first frame and click on the symbol from there and under properties there should be a lot of options. Find one that changes the motion into tweening and

There you go; your symbol moves smoothly across the canvas~ Very useful!

There IS a drawback though. When you try to convert a .swf file into say a .avi file or a .mov file the quality is ruined.... Some people buy different products to do it but I just keep it as .swf and upload it on deviantart :b

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