Ever wanted to animate one of the characters you’ve drawn? Maybe you are looking to bring an extra dimension to your Youtube videos, or make a video game. Then here are six free animation apps you might want to consider starting with.
If you’re looking for apps for digital painting, check these out: 5 Free Drawing Apps for PC/Mobile
1. For 3D animation – Go for Blender
Blender is a great open-source and versatile suite of tools. It’s intended to handle the full 3D and 2D animation pipelines. That includes modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, and video editing.
Being as packed with features as it is, beginners might be a little overwhelmed at first. As with any such software, you’ll need to take some time to familiarize yourself with things before you jump into your first animated feature. Thankfully, Blender has a range of tutorials from Beginner to Advanced, right on their website.
You can also head over to their Youtube channel and find this Fundamentals playlist for version 2.80
Free 2D animation software
2. OpenToonz (Windows and MacOS)
Oh, you know, just the software that was used to animate Studio Ghibli films like Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away. OpenToonz was also used for Hiromasa Yonebayashi’s Mary and the Witch’s Flower, and Batman Ninja directed by Junpei Mizusaki.
Used with such big names in the anime film world, this professional-level software, as expected, is packed with features. It may take a fair amount of time to really get familiar with things. Maybe not the best option if you are a newbie just wanting to create a quick and simple thing for your vlog. But if you are wanting to do serious animation, then this looks to be one of the best free apps to go for.
There are a few video tutorials on Youtube, but also check out the User Manual to get you started.
3. Krita – For digital painting AND animation (Win and MacOS)
Krita tends to be the one I recommend when someone is looking for a solid free digital art app. With it, you can not only do detailed digital paintings, but you can animate those paintings as well. That is thanks to a Kickstarter in 2015 to develop and add that into the program.
Two particularly nice things with Krita. One: you can pull in audio files. And two: you can pretty much use any of the painting brush tools to draw up your animations as well.
Check out the Animation section in the Krita User Guide to get you familiar with things before going on to some tutorials.
4. Pencil 2D
For simple 2D animations, Pencil2D might be the way to go. It has a pretty straightforward interface and user-friendly making it a good starting point for beginners. It has both raster and vector drawing tools, and an uncluttered timeline. Though seemingly simple, one can actually quite a bit with this.
5. Autodesk Sketchbook (Windows and MacOS)
So I’ve drawn a little in Sketchbook but had no idea until researching this piece that you could animate in it as well. It looks to be a great option for more simple animations that you might layer in to another video. You are limited to only two layers for a frame, but if you are one to everything on one layer, you’ll be fine with this.
Here is another tutorial by kdsketch to help you find your way around
6. Plastic Animation Paper Pro4 (Windows)
Last but definitely not least… Plastic Animation Paper is an independent project made by one man: Niels Krogh Mortensen. Niels is a professional character animator that has been working in the industry for 30 years. He developed it for a smooth transition for people going from analogue into digital frame-by-frame animation.
You can bring in audio, and it has a very smooth previewing feature which is obviously an important thing for this kind of work.
You can find tutorials on the site here to help you get started.
The complete overhaul of the program is underway with the Alpha version available for download when you sign up. Below is a look at drawing in that.
(Part 1 here)
Download Plastic Animation Paper Pro4 Original
Wrapping up…
I hope this piece on free animation apps helps you get started. As always, be sure to check the system requirements before you download to make sure your system will handle things with minimal frustration. Animation can be quite a process, so it’s worth taking the time to dig into some tutorials and have a little browse at the user manual so that you can get familiar with things.
If you are a total beginner looking for hardware options or learning resources, then check out our Digital Art For Beginners post.
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