What are /r/learnanimation's favorite Products & Services?

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Oh hey, just like me!

I'll say this upfront though: animation is much more difficult and involved than music. Music is _easy_. There is a reason it takes hundreds of people at Pixar three years to make a ninety minute movie and only a few weeks for a composer and an orchestra to compose and record a score for it. It takes rare amounts of patience and skill to create animation even after devoting years of study to it.

It's totally worth it, though. :)

If you are interested in the hand-made look of stop-motion but you don't have the space, you can still use 3D animation software like Blender but do your animation using constant/stepped keyframes. Computer animation often uses interpolation to smooth the motions out, but constant/stepped keyframes switches that off.

If you specifically want to do plasticine animation, you can still do that virtually by using a sculpting workflow where you sculpt something for each new frame and render as you go. Again, you could use Blender to render out the frames and compile everything into a movie afterwards.

If you want to try out some 2D animation, Krita can hook you up.

Blender and Krita are both free open source software so they don't cost any money to download and use. My advice would be to spend any money on training to start with, then jump up to fancier software later on (if you need to).

Hey! So, that video is vector art with a lot of 'camera moving' and some puppet animations.
I would expect that all of this animation was done in a combination of Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Animate CC (formerly called Adobe Flash). In fact, all of it could have been created in Adobe Animate CC on its own.
The Adobe suite is a monthly subscription, and there are lots of great tutorials out there on youtube for it. I like the 'Draw with Jazza' series along with many others.

If you can't afford or don't want to go the monthly fee route, then the opensource free software option would be a software called Inkspace to create the vector art. As far as the animation goes, I honestly don't know if Inkspace has a frame/video editor in it because I've only used it to draw before.

This link here has a lot of opensource programs that compare to Animate CC.

Hopefully that all helps!

To be honest, especially if you are saying "The budget is irrelevant" it matters much less than you think.

Laptop vs Desktop: Are you going to want to use your computer in more than one place? If so, get a laptop. If not, it doesn't matter very much.

Windows vs Mac: Some programs built for windows don't run natively on OS X. Usually, you can use programs like wineskin to run them. Sometimes this won't work, and you will have to dualboot your machine and make a windows partition with bootcamp. Mac computers also usually come with less powerful GPUs, but not all of them. However, even the ones without powerful GPUs will be enough for learning 3D modeling and animation. If you run into the problem where you don't have good enough hardware to do what you want, you're probably doing things poorly, and should change your technique rather than get better hardware. In the end, there's one thing that matters above all else: what machine do you feel most comfortable using? If it's windows, get that. If it's mac, get that. If it's your favorite brand of linux, get that.

Toon Boom harmony just came out recently and its quite good from what I hear. You can try it free for 21 days and then there is a subscription fee ($20+usd pm) https://www.toonboom.com/products/harmony/try

That said a lot of animators are still using macromedia flash 8 because its the most stable and easiest to use version of flash. Heaps of tutorials for it given how old it is. This version was from before adobe bought out macromedia and ruined the software http://qpdownload.com/macromedia-flash-8/

I recently found this video from Alex Grigg, who makes exceptional animations with Photoshop. The gist of it is that he uses video layers when he is doing straight ahead animation, like effects, or clean up and color. Character animation is generally done with a different layer for each frame, which gives him better ability to adjust the timing.

If you're animating strictly on two's, couldn't you just half the frame rate?

I don't think there's a special name for this type of animation, They all have a high frame rate, lots of energy and flow well. A lot of the effects in those animation remind of those used in sakuga animation. Here is an example of sakuga effects -https://vimeo.com/83169596

I don't think there is a specific term for it. "Liquid motion" is probably a good term, but I've never heard it used before this video. This video is a good starting point, though, look at the other stuff by artists featured on it for more examples.

If you're looking for lettering, the Franchise animated font is really good. You can get the AE source files for free, too!

Look for 2d effects animation tutorials, too, like impact clouds or water. Here's Adam Phillips animating a dust cloud to get you started.

Check out blender. You can for sure make videos like this fairly easily once you get familiar with 3d modeling. Plenty of tutorials on YouTube too. Blender Guru is a good place to start.

I don't have the experience to make a firm recommendation, but of the programs I've tried, Toon Boom seems best. Just be aware that minutes of hand-drawn animation will take a very long time.

As for the version issue:

>Can I move my data From one Harmony edition to a different Harmony edition?

>Yes. The editions share the same data format. So you can load projects created in Harmony Essentials into Harmony Advanced for example. Going the other direction, anything done with a functionality that is not available in that Harmony edition will be visible but not editable.

Source

You want free? Blender's last couple updates have included expansion on it's ability to create hand-drawn-looking 2D animation. It may be worth looking into for you.

Another possibility is Krita, which also recently added animation capabilities similar to Photoshop's. I haven't gotten to play around with it yet, so I can't vouch how good or bad it really is.

Though if you can find a way to acquire it, it sounds like Flash would be ideal for what you're doing.

MPEG Streamclip is free. It can take a video and export an image sequence.

http://www.squared5.com/

Not sure what you mean about FPS, though.

Also, Richard Williams' book The Animators Survival Kit is rather good for walk reference.

Came to say: Richard Williams seemed to put a lot of emphasis on life drawing in the animators survival kit.

You can buy it, buy it used or easily steal it. Maybe read Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain as well, again, new, used, stolen are all out there if you want to pick it up.

TV Paint is a great tool for 2D drawn - it's essentially photoshop with frames, onionskinning etc. It's used professionally so it's certainly a good piece of software.

I tend to use AfterEffects myself, creating elements in Photoshop and then importing them across but you can also have a go at vector animation in it too, something Animade are great at: https://vimeo.com/animadetv

If she wants to pursue 2D animation, a Wacom tablet as others have suggested will go far. As well, OpenToonz--the animation software used by, among others, Studio Ghibli--is free to use.

As a 3D animator though, I suggest Blender, another open source, free to use and very popular piece of software. I personally see a future where Blender overtakes Autodesk Maya as the industry standard in 3D animation software.

Both have very active communities here on Reddit, as well as elsewhere, though her being 11, you'll likely want to wait a few years before letting her meet the Reddit community.

If you want to get her something to serve as a drawing tablet, but don't want to risk it being a waste if she drops animation as an interest, I suggest a quality 2-in-1 laptop (such as the Microsoft Surface) or an iPad. These would thus have more general use beyond just for drawing.

Also, because I've struggled to help my parents understand how I want to use animation to make a career: while I and most other animators are interested in entertainment, there is application elsewhere. For example, I interviewed for a job just yesterday, where I would develop 3D renders (using Blender) of their clients' oil & gas pipelines and refineries. The client would then be able to navigate the facility and view the data from their pipeline monitoring systems, in real time, as well as view historic records from their sensors. There are a variety of uses for animation skills today!

Software depends on what you're going with. If 2D an Adobe CC subscription will cost you no more than $50+ a month. It includes after effects and flash as animation programs and there's a smaller level Cinema 4D included.

You'd have to buy Cinema 4D outright from their site if you're looking for more tools and features.

Toonz has already been pointed out.

For 3D we're talking Maya or something else. I don't know too much about 3D as I'm a 2D motion graphics animator. Adobe CC is enough for me currently. But Blender is a free 3D alternative.

This can be done with many programs. I'd use After Effects to create the composition (tree, moon,...). The only moving part is the water which is looped.

After Effects is not free but you can have a similar result with free alternatives: https://alternativeto.net/software/adobe-after-effects/

The simplest program I've used has been Digicel Flipbook. The program is so simple, it barely gets in the way of animating, especially if you come from a background of animating on actual paper. It's used to do line tests in certain animation schools. However, since the software is so simple and bare bones, most people don't use it for doing much more than line tests.

Have you tried Synfig? It's free, and it seems to still be updated. I haven't used it in forever though.

TVPaint is a professional 2D animation suite that's meant for traditional animation, and has been used on a lot of traditional 2D animation films in Europe. It has slowly, but increasingly been seeing use here in US and Canada. The UI is very different from the Adobe layout we're all used to, so there's a bit of a steep learning curve to learning all the features and shortcuts.

The creator of Plastic Animation Paper is in the process of creating a new 2D traditional animation program that focuses on being as intuitive and as easy to use as possible. You might want to sign up for 1st access.

http://animationpaper.com/

Pencil2D is a great free program for learning animation!
Toon Boom starts at only $15 a month, and would be the program to learn if you're serious about animation. It's the program I use the most for my animations.
Hope this helps! :)

Synfig is free animation software, though I don't know much about it. It should do what you're looking for. http://www.synfig.org/cms/en/download
Blender also has animation capabilities both for 2D and 3D animation. https://www.blender.org/download/
Good luck! :)

https://alternativeto.net/software/adobe-flash/

Here's some free options. I'm downloading SynfigStudio as I type this to try it out. I have the Adobe Suite monthly already, but I like to try opensource to stay up with them as well.

If you want to learn how to accurately, I would highly recommend 'drawing from the right side of the brain' by Betty Edwards. I used to teach drawing to architecture students and I used many of these exercises. You don't need to read a word of the book, just do the exercises. They'll teach you to stop seeing 'objects' and start seeing spatial relationships, which is the key to drawing accurately.

https://www.amazon.com/New-Drawing-Right-Side-Brain/dp/0874774241/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1492836156&sr=8-3&keywords=drawing+from+the+right+side+of+the+brain

Start here .. This is required reading if you seriously want to get in to animation.