I’m doing my final college graduation project now. And since I’m interested in open-source programs, I wanted to try making the 2d short using only these.
Recently, my NID animation batch started making 1 short gif per person per week based on a common topic decided over the weekend. This perfectly aligned with my interests : I wanted to do some test animations for a while now to test the technical aspects of what I was aiming to achieve using open-source softwares.
So, here are the breakdowns of my tests using Blender, Krita, Gimp (with G’MIC), Natron and Inkscape.
Thanks! I’m working on a longer 2d open-source project now
No. I know the GSOC krita animation feature is available separately, but I’m eagerly waiting for it’s incorporation into the official stable Krita before using it. Since the project I’m working on is bigger than anything I’ve yet done, I wanted to use more stable tools, which wouldn’t stop being supported before I’m finished.
Hey, these are some really great tests. Thanks for posting.
It makes me think I really must look much more into doing more with the grease pencil.
Did you try Pencil 2D as well ? Its been around a while and went quiet for a bit but it seems to be getting some love and development attention again now.
Yes Toka, do try greasepencil. Even I didn’t expect much of it, and was going to do traditional paper animation, and use blender mainly just for setting up 3d lighting. But greasepencil was pretty good so I decided to use that itself. Yes, I tried Pencil2D too. In its current stage, it’s good for quick linetests. But greasepencil gives more options while working and also while exporting.
It feels so good to see someone trying to animate only with FOSS. I’ve been also trying this multi-software workflow and I love it. Some of the developers are making good efforts to allow it. For example, at Libre Graphics Meeting we talked about sharing brush libraries across the programs!
And, coming back from off-topic, there are good animations in there, shaheen! Keep it up
Thanks Kednar. It’s good to know that development is happening in that direction. One major reason I did these are to check for myself and show other 2d animators and developers that it’s possible to create 2d animation using only FLOSS. Only if more people get interested and try it can we find out more useful tricks, shortcomings and areas of improvement.
Yes Lanberlik. Test them. It’s fun.
Thanks MD Interactive.
Thanks kriskendallvfx. I was sick when I made the snot one. I wasn’t crying while making the Tears one though
Wow, really nice stuff! Love that there’s a growing community of 2D animators making use of the grease pencil. I’ve been using Blender and Manga Studio as my cheap-ish 2D animation suite, but I’d never heard of Krita before now! Cheers for that
I like what you did with the grease pencil. I haven’t try anything with it yet but i made a few 2d animations with Blender for a friend’s wedding. They can be seen on my youtube channel.
I loved the scarecrow anim on your channel! Was it done in Blender too?
Thanks pepeland!
woah 3dSaM. That’s a huge compliment!
Thanks Doc Whitaker! 2d frame-by-frame animation is being developed into Krita right now, and it looks promising even at this very early stage. This gif was made entirely in Krita.
Gieop_joze … No. The scarecrow one was done earlier. I used Adobe Photoshop, Flash and AfterEffects for that one.
I’ve started looking into Krita and it seems to be everything I’ve been dreaming for. After I’ve finished my Grease Pencil animation tests I’ll be starting up with it for sure.
Cool animation btw. Gets me excited for all the cool stuff you can do by combing a competent animation program with a powerful brush engine
SleepySlipWalk (4Feb2017)
This one was completely done in Krita, from rough to coloring. A short loop animation trying out Krita(3.1.1)'s frame-by-frame tools.
Currently, I’m continuing work on the short film, animating in blender greasepencil, and coloring sometimes using greasepencil, but mostly using G’MIC.
And now I’ve started making tutorials explaining my process.
This one is on how to use G’MIC to color animations, a process I use to color many of my 2d animations. It uses only free, open-source softwares like GIMP, G’MIC plugin for GIMP and Export layers plugin by khalim19.
The advantage of this method is that:
-unlike painting manually, the line edges are detected automatically & large areas are colored quickly.
-unlike bucketfill, this works well even if the line is sketchy/rough and has huge gaps. And coloring mistakes can be fixed iteratively.
-it gives fully filled, aliased color images which are great for compositing.