Can somebody please recommend a good program for 2D animation?

Question

The sort you might find in an anime or television cartoon, not the short flashes that people generally make with Macromedia Flash, and not the 3D of Autodesk Maya.  I'm planning for a huge project, but I don't want to spend large amounts of money  on a program not made for the scale of animation I'm attempting (10-minute chunks of time).  It also must be able to incorporate sound files from microphone recordings (I'll purchase said microphone separately).  Has anybody tried a good program/knows someone who has?

Anonymous · Accepted Answer

Some of the better commercial 2D animation programs such as Digicel Flipbook, Toon Boom, TVPaint, TAB, and PAP, have Student or Express versions that are fairly inexpensive. However, you might be disappointed by how crippled these stripped down programs are compared to their more expensive Pro versions. But if you look hard enough you should be able to find them cracked online (rapidshare, bittorrent). There are some free alternatives.

If you're doing old school drawn on paper frame by frame stuff or stop-motion or 2D, I'd suggest MonkeyJam. It's free.

http://www.giantscreamingrobotmonkeys.com/monkeyjam


If you're on a Mac, use Pencil(there's PC and Linux versions as well).

http://www.les-stooges.org/pascal/pencil/index.php


If you want to do Flash animation like the stuff on Newgrounds.com, either break down and buy Adobe Flash or you can try Creatoon or Synfig, which are free. They're not Flash, but they also do vector based symbol oriented 
animation.

http://www.creatoon.com/index.php

http://www.synfig.org/



Here are some online resources about the basic principles of animation.

http://www.idleworm.com/how/index.shtml
http://www.awn.com/tooninstitute/lessonplan/lesson.htm
http://www.animationarchive.org/2006/05/media-preston-blairs-animation-first.html
http://www.animationarchive.org/2006/05/media-preston-blairs-animation-1st.html
http://www.karmatoons.com/drawing/1a.htm
http://www.animationarena.com/principles-of-animation.html
http://w ww.animationmeat.com/notes/notes.html

? · Answer

Create 3D Animations Easily : http://3dAnimationCartoons.com/?WxUX

takabanana · Answer

Toon Boom Studio rocks!  It's not free though - but very very flexible and powerful for what you are describing.

NaCH3COO · Answer

Hope this helps:

http://www.toonboom.com/main/

http://www.plasticanimationpaper.dk/

http://fossed.blogspot.com/2008/04/pencil-open-source-2d-animation.html

http://www.digicelinc.com/

http://www.bauhaussoftware.com/

Good Luck

$$Troy$$ · Answer

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Can somebody please recommend a good program for 2D animation?

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