5 Free Animation Apps That Are Really Good

this video is sponsored by Squarespace this is a list of my five favorite free animation apps and I have some criteria not any old animation app can wander off the street and make my list you've gotta earn it with this roundup I wanted to find free apps that could possibly replace Adobe animate in my workflow what you're watching right now I made all of this in adobe animate it's easy ish kind of fast I guess okay not fast but faster than animating say frame by frame anyway it just has a lot of things built-in that speed up my workflow so simple apps that let me draw frame by frame are not practical for getting videos out in a timely manner those are cool and there's a couple that actually make this list but you have to do more than just give me some basic frame by frame animations on the other side of the spectrum our animation apps that give you a bunch of illustrative assets and the tools to move them around those are great for presentations little marketing videos but there aren't great for me I like making my own assets that's one thing I can do fairly well I like to give my videos their own unique Brad branded feel so those apps are out too then there are the 3d apps like blender blender looks amazing and you can crank out some amazing animations out of it and it has some 2d animation features and it almost made this list but I'm gonna be mainly focusing here on 2d animation apps if you want a nice 3d app just leave now go check out blender that's that's where you want to be looking so a list I made a list these are the things that I'm looking for in an app that can replace animate for me one I want to be able to draw directly in the program and draw fairly well to I need to be able to import sound so I can do things like lip syncing also timing my animation to what's happening in the video 3 I would like a symbol library of some kind or some shortcuts so I can reuse assets that is traited in one part of the video later on in the same video for a timeline that lets me tween basically twinning is when you move an object from like one place or to another or or zoom in and out and what the program does is it handles all the frames in between hence the term tween and five has to be free none of this free trial stuff or in-app purchases free is in I have some extra cats here you can have one for free three I'm not a fool I don't pay for cats so those are the big things not every app here on this list has all five of those but if I can get most of the way there or if I think they're interesting enough they made it onto this list all right so let's get on with this first pencil 2d it's an open source 2d animation program named after pencils it has a lot of the features that I'm looking for but not quite everything it has raster and vector tools vector drawing tools is something that animate has as well if you create a vector asset and you need to zoom in on it say in a future scene you can scale it up no problemo try to do that with raster graphics it's yes problemo they all blurry and fuzzy and gross so I like working with vectors and animations so I can reuse the art assets where I can some of the other apps on this list can be overwhelming especially in the first day or two when you're using them I didn't get that feel at all from pencil 2d this is definitely one of the if not the most user-friendly apps on this list and because of that it can feel a little limiting at times I know the drawing tools definitely felt limiting to me you just can't do all that much the timeline is also really simple but if you're just starting out that's not necessarily a bad thing since a lot of animation apps conceive overwhelming especially when you dive into the timeline and everything that can be used their overall pencil 2d doesn't exactly fit my needs the vector tools are a nice touch though I still like to have symbols and I'd still like to have tweening or something that would let me work with this application in the same way but I still thought it was good enough to make this list it's available on Mac Windows and Linux however I would say when I first tested it out on the Mac I'm not sure I would recommend using it there it's a little wonky especially when I was painting the brush drag was really slow and it can be kind of buggy okay it could be very very buggy next up on my list is Krita Krita also made my other list of favorite free drawing apps that I made a couple weeks ago actually Krita is my favorite free drawing app since Krita is a full-blown art app I expected the animation features just to be kind of bolted on as an afterthought but what really surprised me as I dug in is how well thought-out they are if you go into the workspaces change it up to animation you'll get all the tools you need to get started adding frames onion skinning framerate adjusting all of the essentials right there doesn't have symbols it doesn't have tweening and at this point it doesn't perfectly fit my workflow but you can pull in audio files in the big benefit one big benefit of Krita has over something like adobe animate is the depth of the painting and drawing tools at your disposal where in flash are limited to the vector brushes that are in there and Krita you can pretty much paint in any style that your heart desires paint brushes textures everything that you can paint with in Krita when you're just drawn and painting around are at your disposal for animation as well but what I really like here is the frame by frame interface let's take a look at some of the streamline UI tweaks they make to make this fun to animate in the first is something called the auto frame mode when it's turned on you start to draw on a new frame and it'll just make a new keyframe there automatically you don't have to right-click and say make a new frame and then name it all you have to do is click on the next frame start drawing and it's gonna automatically keep what's in the previous frame that came before it and as I'm describing this I'm realizing this sounds really boring but the reason I like it so much is because it cuts out so many extra steps as you go when you create hundreds of frames when you're doing an animation all those extra little clicks add up you can tell that this was thought through by someone who's done a fair amount of animation for at least frame by frame animation in the past and understands the process and the workflow as an extension of this nice floor flow is the ability to set up keyboard shortcuts so you can quickly set up the program to work the way that you need it to work and if you're using a drawing tablet with hotkeys you can map those shortcuts that you just put together to your drawing tablet and make your life even easier you do need a plugin to export your videos but once that setup it's pretty easy to use I did say and one of my videos a couple weeks ago that I was thinking about doing a tutorial on Critias animation features cuz they're so cool but then I found one it's done by Kady sketch I watched the whole thing I really loved it and it's probably better than anything I could put together so I'll stick the link down below in the description so Krita is free if you download it from their website I heard it's also in the Windows Store but you might get charged for it there just go to credit org and if you really love credit and want to support what's going on over there and the development there is a donation option available on their website speaking of websites today's sponsor Squarespace can hook you up with one I took it for a spin and built a portfolio to showcase my illustration work they have some really nice templates they're just easy to customize portfolio templates ecommerce templates blog templates that's just scratching the surface all of these templates are a great starting point for whatever you want to create and as a former web designer I like the fiddle so I like that I could jump in and get really granular with the design if you're showing off your work to potential clients or you're looking to land a full-time job these templates look really professional and if you want to take your website to the next level you can set up your own domain or transfer one you already have head to squarespace.com for a free trial when you're ready to launch go to squarespace.com slash Brad Kolbo to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain next on my list is synfig studio and it can do everything I can do in adobe animate at least on paper it can that's the good news the bad news is that poking around synfig gets pretty intimidating it does a lot the granularity of options here is immense every other app on this list I felt pretty comfortable with just jumping in and doing some simple animations synfig did throw me a little maybe it threw me a lot for example it's pretty common for me when I'm starting up with a new program do Google how to do things usually the things I'm googling aren't like the obvious things but here I had to Google everything I had to Google how do you delete something in synfig it's not as easy as just hitting the Delete key the upside is under the hood synfig can do so much it really seems like it can do just about anything here I just have to poke around long enough to figure out how to do it if you're going to tap the potential of this app make sure you set aside a good chunk of time to actually learn it I would also encourage you to make your own art assets at another app and then bring them over synfig does have some basic drawing tools like brushes or racers but they're not really good to draw with sometimes I like to draw fast and those strokes can get a little geometric so Brad why the heck is this on your list well I almost pulled synfig off but because of its support for tweening animation and some of the advanced reading options for character models I felt like it should really be here I feel like there's a lot of folks out here who would truly appreciate everything you can do in this app and it was worth sharing there are some really advanced features here that you just don't usually see in free apps in fact I think I can confidently say you can find in no other free app and for more complicated videos and animations this can be very very powerful and I can't state that enough so since a gets to stay on the list just make sure you approach it with patience if you plan to get the most out of it next up we have animation paper it is developed by one guy whose name I am about to mispronounce Niels Krug Mortensen I have a soft spot in my heart for software developers who are just out there making their own thing that's exactly what he's doing now technically this app doesn't fit all five of my criteria but after watching him talk about why he's designing his animation app the way he is I love it man I just had to add it to my list animation paper is primarily a frame-by-frame animation app nellis is a character animator and looking at how he uses his own app it is really good and every feature in this app is in here for a reason there's a strong emphasis on flipping in traditional animation you're flipping the pages of your animation so you can see how they flow he's built a lot of that into this app and it goes beyond just onion skinning responsiveness and smoothness of his previews are also a high priority because in frame-by-frame animation being able to preview your animation a couple frames at a time and see how smooth your animation is is a big big deal this app is built from the ground up with that workflow in mind he's not reinventing the wheel or doing anything I haven't seen in other apps what makes this special is how he has chosen to prioritize the features he is a professional animator and he uses this for his own workflow even though there's no tweeny included here he has other features in place it makes it really easy to duplicate multiple frames at a time so say you make your characters animation walk cycle you can repeat that over and over again without doing a lot of extra work or heavy lifting same with tools that'll to duplicate portions of your artwork that you can reuse on other frames these aren't symbols necessarily like the way Adobe animate has symbols but they can function and you can use them in a similar way and because of that it feels like it makes the process a lot easier there's a timeline let you play sound on it goes on its own Channel and this I really like this touch there's an ability to leave notes next to your frames I can see here in his own samples he has notes on how long he wants each part to take kind of the bouncing of his animation cycle I had never thought of that but being able to kind of map out your animation ahead of time to know how long it is could be incredibly helpful he's also working on a new version of the app he's charging for beta access to that but right now the Windows version of the old app is completely free and available on his website last but definitely not least is open tunes which is probably my winner for checking the most boxes and coming the farthest to replace Adobe animate for me in fact if I had to I could replace animate completely just with open tunes it does everything I needed to do in fact it does a lot a lot more if we start by looking at the drawing tools they're just far beyond what you're gonna find an animate well they kind of are and base open tunes they're not but you can add to them for example you can add in my paintbrush sets in to open tunes and there are a lot of cool natural media brushes here that can turn open tunes into a full-blown art app maybe not quite on the same level as Krita but it's a big step closer to it on top of that the native open tunes you can have vector paintbrush options so if you want a sketch with say a pencil and then finish it off with brush and ink stunnin vectors you can totally do that here if you're used to using Adobe animate I will say this is a very different program and a lot of the differences are in how things are labeled and how the workflow is handled for example symbols are called sub sheets took me a while to figure that one out one piece of advice that I saw over and over again in my research were folks saying don't treat this the way you treat Adobe animate instead treat it like it's own thing open tunes is built around the way traditional animation studios work and it pulls a lot of its vernacular into the application instead of a horizontal timeline you get a column view timeline at first I found this really disorienting but really it's not bad it's just a little different overall I feel like I barely scratched the surface of what open tunes can do there's a whole camera system that I don't fully understand how much it can do there's a whole FX schematic section which I completely don't understand what you can do there's just so much here and you can grab open tunes on their website and it's available for Mac or for Windows so those are my five favorite animation apps what is your favorite Sid I'd leave it off the list let me know down below in the comments thank you guys for watching really appreciate it and I'll talk to you in a couple of days [Music]

Channel: Brad Colbow

Views: 2,836,079

Keywords: animation, tech, technology, illustration, open toonz, flash, adobe animate, painting, krita, synfig, pencil 2d, animation paper, procreate, ipad, windows, mac, apple

Id: zpNvnqy8u6U

Length: 14min 7sec (847 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 03 2019