I’m looking for a 2D animation program to use when I do my storyboards and rough animation blocking (I like to sketch them). I’ve had my eye on “Pencil ( http://www.pencil-animation.org/ )” for a while, but it seems that the development has slowed down… or come to an complete halt.
At work we use TV Paint (http://www.tvpaint.com) which I like a lot, and I’m thinking about buying it for my project at home. But I wanted to hear if anyone else has tested and used other 2d animation software that they are happy with.
Many applications out there are 2D cutout animation softwares, but I need a software which is aimed at drawn animation.
FOSS solutions: Gimp + GAP (GIMP animation package) for simple onionskin style animation or try synfig, which is a full fat studio solution. Since I prefer painting in Krita, there is an animation plugin for Krita in development. If you want a solution for your studio and are willing to pay, have a look at Toon Boom Harmony. I think Howl’s Moving Castle was produced with this suite. I am a Miyazaki fanboi though…
or just get a peg bar, a three hole punch, and do it on paper, using a digital camera and an app like Blender to crunch the frames
whoops, seems you’ve seen pencil already- I think devs have picked it up however. PAP to me seems like a dead project. There is also synfig to check out.
PAP is free, but not open. I understand they’re preparing a new (expensive) version now. Anime studio pro used to be the shareware “Moho” which I bought. It then got bought out by a bigger company and rereleased for double the price. Now I refuse to use it just on principle. I hate it when companies do that (Cool edit pro/Adobe Audtion anyone?)
Since pencil is open source, wouldn’t it be nice if someone picked up development again? I like it, but it needs work.
Pencil was quite good when I tested it a few years ago, but had it’s issues. I should have mentioned that I’m looking for a software that runs both on Linux/OSX. We use mostly Linux at work, but I work just as much on OSX as I do on Linux.
Plasticpaper has the best brush/pencil feeling of them all. Though it’s sad to see that they are only giving out the Windows version. But I couldn’t get over the hole XSheet timeline. I guess it’s something that you are familiar with if you are a trained 2D animator.
TVPaint, even though it’s costly, has all the features and 1000 more that I need. So in essence, “Pencil” would be the perfect application.
Manga Studio and the others aren’t so much a 2D drawn animation software, and they are way to advanced and have too many features that I would never use. And they are vector based. As soon as you see that they are vector based you know that they are aimed at Flash, HTML5, Anime style of animations.
I’ve personally been looking for a good open-source or even freeware 2d animation program and tested a few and must say that I’m not really that satisfied with what I’ve found.
I’ve used pencil (on windows), not for animation but for storyboarding a short. A huge problem that at times occurred, when the project got a bit bigger, was that the program at times saved the frames in wrong order or moved the drawings around the screen.
There has been some “behind the scenes development” of pencil and they have some beta releases found in their forum found at: http://lesstooges.free.fr/pencil/forum/viewtopic.php?id=1474
I haven’t tried these so I don’t know if they’ve solved the issue.
Plastic animation paper (PAP) I think is pretty cool altough I’ve had some issues with moving frames in the program. Also, when using PAP, another program is needed to cleanup and color the animation.
Gimp GAP isn’t really practical for more than very short animations, altough it is quite usable for finishing up the animation previously done in PAP.
I got Tupi (a fork of K-toon) but haven’t really had a chans of using it so I can’t really critic it.
Synfig, at least what I’ve seen of it, seems to mainly bee for cut-out animation. It may work to do 2d (drawn) in it but I doubt it is optimal for it. But I haven’t tested it so I may be wrong.
When I studied animation at Diagonalakademin we used Flipbook for 2d (it’s not free but fairly cheep). It is annoying at times but works well for simple animation.
To sum it up. At the moment I’m not really satisfied with the options out there for simple flipbook-like animation software on the “free market”, although there are commercial programs I haven’t tried.
