/ani/ - Animation

>>90
the ones i know are easy toon, pencil, flipbook studdio, flash, and tv paint.

>>90

Plastic Animation Paper was popular in its heyday, maybe you could check it out.

http://animationpaper.com/old-pap-free-download/

>>96
This. It may have and outdated UI, but PAP 4.0 is one of the best virtual light boxes I have ever seen. Its free and is grate for line tests.

Pros: Powerful, free, light box inspired, very customizable, Pen Pressure Support.
Cons: Old, Little documentation, learning curve, quirky UI.

8/10 at first, but when you get use to its work flow, it will be a valuable tool.

>>90
flash

Go on the pirate bay and get Flash CS6. It'll be perfect.

>>96
Thanks for this.

Will also vouch for PAP 4.0, it's pretty okay, I just wish it had better audio support. Easytoon's also been used to make some nice stuff, although it's black-and-white and doesn't have audio support at all.

Synfig's surprisingly powerful, but if you ask me, it's a bit too clunky for a beginner to do what they want in it. It kind of shares the GIMP's flaw of being a little bit too technical for an artist (have you seen the page for setting up a multiplane camera? Geh). That said, I like it, and you can do some great stuff in it. I actually look forward to the future release, because it seems they've implemented sound and frame-by-frame.

I'm not actually sure if it would be worth bothering with Pencil at this stage. Even the Pencil2D branch is still woefully immature in terms of capability. Like, maybe for trivial things, it's okay, but I wouldn't count on it for anything else.

I got Toon Boom Studio one Christmas and I like it, save for its Quicktime dependencies, although I will admit I have not messed around with it too much. I also played with Flash a little bit some time back, and I think Toon Boom is a bit more animator-friendly, from my limited experience.

If you're willing to suffer Blender's nuances, it can be a nice tool for planning 2D animations after setting up the UI a little bit, using the vector-based Grease Pencil and Camera View. Probably the best audio/video support, and it also has some tablet pressure support, but I wouldn't expect to make a full 2D film in it or anything. Also the Grease Pencil can be somewhat imprecise, but I guess if you're just planning frames, it's not so bad.

A great frame by frame animation program doesn't exist in my opinion, a free one even less so.

I wish I could program native applications, I'd love to give it a try. I can only do web applications and that's not so convenient, I made a browser animation program once, but there's a lot of problems with browser apps.

>>310
I think flash is actually very good for fbf if you can put up with the vector drawing tools. The timeline, layer and onion tools have always been sensible even in older versions.

Krita has some animation tools in development. I think we should throw all effort/money behind krita instead of further fragmenting the dev community with yet another animation program that won't go anywhere.

>>311
Animation as a secondary function in an art program is almost guaranteed to not be very good. The layer system is very different from a proper timeline, and the focus of memory/resource management as far as programming is concerned is also very different.

Also, I like krita but I'm very doubtful about it.

>>310
>>311
>>312
I would be all for extending an existing application, but I wouldn't know where to start, nor how far one could go. It really might be better just to start from scratch. Programs like GIMP and Inkscape and large and complex and would require a lot of work, probably (and believe me, I'd love to improve GIMP to the point where we'd never need GAP again).

I know MyPaint had an X-Sheet branch. Haven't looked too much into that. MyPaint's also largely Python, I think, so maybe it wouldn't be too hard to make changes.

Speaking of Python, I looked into perhaps doing something with Blender now that Python scripting's a bigger part of it, but I don't think the Python scripting in Blender is quite that powerful, or at least I haven't seen anything that isn't essentially a glorified macro. It just doesn't look suitably ambitious.

>>310

TVpaint is based.

>>318
It might work if you separated the program into a painting mode and an animation mode, instead of trying to hack together both like photoshop. That way you could throw away leave any obstacles in the different mode and focus on the important shit.

For example, in painting mode it's very important to focus processing power and memory in large canvas, brushes, blending effects, and maximum view quality. But in animation mode it's very important to focus on managing, playing, and switching potentially thousands of frames in real time without hiccups.

But I'm pretty confident that krita is going to try stick together some kind of combo mode that only does one thing well and the other is a borderline useless gimmick that's only waste of space & time.

>>325
Eh, well, from what I've seen from Krita's extension, it's at least a step up from GAP in terms of doing frame by frame stuff.

But I think you're right, more or less. I've been itching to find some problem to solve via programming, and this might just be it, maybe. Who knows? I'm gonna have to dink around and see. No promises right now, but I'd like to make something free and open-source so /ani/ can make cool stuff.

>>90
Synfig is a great program but it is not useful for casual use, in my opinion.

Especially if you're aiming for traditional frame by frame animation.

TVPaint Studio would be better, but it's non free software.

Synfig is more geared towards cut out and the animation equivalent of enterprise quality software.

Lots of effort with dubious payoff ranging from very low to super high, if you adapt to its clunky way of operation.

Just look at the morevna project and the hubbub hoops they are jumping through, even having to write 3rd party animation sync tools and odd ways of handling shared asset libraries and co.

It's still a great piece of software though, comparable to Toon Boom.