An open source initiative that provides artists with powerful tools for animation, rigging, visual effects, interactive 3D, games, special effects creation, rendering, modeling and texturing.
This book will be an introduction to scripting for Blender, the open source modeling and animation software being used in many studios today. The book will introduce a core set of Blender commands that will allow the reader to script common tasks they’d want to perform in their own work. In order to provide a complete picture of what is possible, the book will also share some of the scripts developed for this project along with suggestions on how they can be applied.
What is an Animation Software Tool?
An Animation Software tool helps create motion from inanimate objects. A series of sequential drawings or drafts are created by artists and then animation software moves these frames one after the other to create an illusion of motion. This is the very basis of creating an animation feature. The modern animation software can add multiple effects and additional substance along with simple animation. Things such as stop-motion, motion capture and, augmented reality have become a major feature in recent years. Animation software tools have become a must for all movie and gaming studios nowadays as special effects can help reduce production costs significantly.
Blender
(Source: Blender)
Features:
- Rendering
- Modelling
- Animation
- VFX
- Simulation
- Pipeline
- Game Creation
- Video Editing
- Scripting
- Customization
Blender is one of the most advanced animation software tools on the internet and it is extremely popular among animators as it is completely free to use along with being open source. Blender has all the features and functions you would want in any animation software and gives its paid and premium competitors a run for their money. Blender can be used to create an array of animations and simulations for anything from movies to games. In short, Blender is probably one of the most complete animation software out there and a must-have for any animator.
OpenToonz
Opentoonz is one of the best free animation software for beginners. It helps coming animators to create beautiful 2D animations and sketches. It also provides many other plugins for to apply different effects such as SDK that allow animators to completely alter animations, tweak color, distortion and more. It is open source and free to download used for both small projects and commercial films. Opentoonz is also compatible with different operating systems including Windows and Mac OS, system requirements are mentioned below. Following are some standout features of OpenToonz:
- Create animations with multiple effects
- Allows you to change the incident light on your animations
- Create a wavy distortion animation for a more detailed 2D animation
- It allows you to create new function to meet the on-site demands of any commercial project
Synfig Studio
It features Vector Tweening, Layers and Filters, Bones, Animation, Bitmap Artwork and Advanced Controls. It is best used to animate cartoons and comics. It is two-dimensional animation software but can as well enable minor 3D aesthetic to the animation. While it focuses on Tweening, and Bitmap Art frame, it enables minor tweaking of colour bits. It’s a complete package for 2D animators.
Pencil 2D
It features Minimal Design, Raster and Vector workflows, Cross-platforms, Hand Drawn Animation and Bitmap Artwork. It is useful for creating intricate animation and hand-drawn animations and then animate it frame by frame along with adding real vectors to it.
TubiTube Desk
TubiTube Desk doesn’t focus on being a professional 2D animation program, but instead, it’s targeting children, hobbyists and amateurs. Its user interface is quite simple, and the program itself only offers the basic features of any 2D animation program, such as the painting/drawing tools, support for importing vector/image files in many formats from other programs, support for rendering the output work in AVI, MPEG and SWF, and manual tweeing, scaling, rotation and opacity.
The program is released under the GPL license, and can be downloaded along its source code from SourceForge. It works on Windows, macOS and Linux.
Krita
(Source: Krita)
Features:
- Compact UI
- Brush Stabilizers
- Brush Engines
- Resource Manager
- Pop-up palette
- Wrap-around mode
- Drawing assistant
- Mirroring tools
- OpenGL Enhanced
Krita is an open source painting and brushing software tool which is very useful to create draft drawings and frames for virtual comics and cartoons. It is one of the most advanced painting and brushing software on the internet. It has advanced tools such as brush stabilizing and wrap-around. Krita is fully OpenGL enhanced which helps in drafting graphics for bigger projects. It also has a drawing and virtual assistant for extra help to the designer. Krita is widely used in the East Asian animation industry for things such as Anime and virtual comic books. You can always make your drafts extra colourful and detailed with the help of Krita.
We have included one more software under the popular category for discussion-Adobe Animate.
Adobe Animate
Adobe Animate is a popular animation software that lets users design interactive vector and bitmap animations. These animations can be built for games, apps, and the web. The animation can be applied to cartoons, banner, tutorials, and infographics. Adobe Animate lets users publish to multiple platforms. It has powerful toolset for animation that lets users create apps, multimedia content, and ads. It supports export to HTML5 Canvas, Flash/Adobe WebGL, SVG, and AIR. Adobe animate is a great platform to build game environments, integrate audio, and design start screens and interfaces. It has a simple frame-by-frame animation, and users can code right inside the projects.
Features:
- Asset Sculpting: users can create new poses for vector using mesh deformation.
- Layer Control: It lets organize animation layers in a parent-child hierarchy.
- Auto Lip-Sync: Automatically match mouth poses to sound inflections
- VR Authoring and Publishing: Use your 2D skills to export 360 VR animations
- It lets users save Animate documents (FLAs and XFLs) incrementally.
- Quick auto-recovery mode
- Export images with the right resolution
- Enhanced asset warping
- Optimize your text atlas outputs
- Generate multiple bitmaps.
- Retain the audio effects when you split the audio, which is imported.
- Create secure AMP-based ads
- Blend modes applied at layer or frame level
Conclusion
OpenToonz is an open source 2D animation software for traditional animation. It is the evolution of Toonz, the software that brought anime to Japan, and is geared towards cartoon professionals. OpenToonz provides superior drawing tools, powerful painting functions, and complete storyboarding abilities. Popular in Asia, it’s still relatively unknown in the West.