
Purpose: Cinema4D is great for beginners and professionals alike as it offers a large array of tools and features. Powerslider with great keyframing feature.It's also a good software for aspiring animators because it's free. Purpose: Blender is great for any professional animation project. Amazing brush selection for creating realistic animations.People use it to create assets for films, tv-shows, and games. Purpose: Autodesk Maya, or just Maya, is a great animation software for creating 3D animations. With Bifrost, you can create incredibly realistic environments.XGen grooming feature allows you to create layers of fur and hair.There are plenty of features to make animations for teaching purposes. Purpose: Powtoon is great to use for both marketers and educators alike. Price: Free plan with limited features / Paid plan $19/month

Large projects can become a slow process.Advanced control of the animation and customization of characters.With free-to-use assets, it is great for small freelance or marketing projects. Purpose: VistaCreate is easy to get into. Price: Free Version with some of the features / Paid version with full features for $10/month. Good for many marketing formats (social media, presentations, and so on).Purpose: The Adobe Animate is great for animating 2D, but it is mainly used by beginners or hobbyists. Asset coding and design all in one software.Vector brushes that are great for creating 2D vector graphics.Adobe Animate virtual camera makes it easier to make great camera movements.This will give you an idea of structuring a frame and story. If you're new to the world of visual creative projects and storytelling, consider reading our article on the basics of filmmaking. In this way, it should be easier for you to decide on what animation software fits your needs! We have gathered the 12 best animation software on the market and their strengths and weaknesses. Would be interesting to hear some animator perspectives in the comments–who’s switching to Toon Boom and who’s sticking with Flash? Speak up.Have you considered starting your animation journey but just found it too hard to find the best animation software for you? Then look no further! Hopefully both software makers will continue to use Cartoon Brew as a battleground for spreading their message. The bottom line is that this competition between software makers should lead to more powerful and efficient packages for the animation community. Not to mention the site’s primary advertising spots are taken up by Toon Boom. It’s no coincidence that industry website Cold Hard Flash recently hosted three launch events in LA, NY and Toronto celebrating the release of Toon Boom Animate. However, certain new features have thrilled the shit outta me! They include armatures (Inverse Kinematics), 3D movieclip translate/scale/rotate, the Motion Editor (an amazing, kickarse version of the old Custom Ease window), Spray Brush (which can spray movieclips all over the Stage – perfect for say, millions of flowers in a meadow, animated swaying in the breeze) and completely new motion tween model. There are a few persistent gripes, such as masking, audio, video format export, brush sizes & shapes, colour management and the Timeline. If you’re sticking with Flash and you decide to upgrade to Flash CS4, I think you’ll be blown away by it. Packed with animator-friendly tools, is based entirely on traditional animation workflow (with all the benefits of digital animation) and has a library of effects that will put your work way ahead of the average web animator.

It’s also the most intuitive of their fantastic animation programs to date and it’s priced very competitively. Animate is definitely an exciting release for animators who are frustrated with the animation limitations of Flash.

We spoke of the animation community’s increasing dissatisfaction with Flash last January when Mucha Lucha creators Eddie Mort and Lili Chin announced they were switching to Toon Boom software.Īustralian animator Adam Phillips, of Bitey Castle fame, has reviewed the new packages from both companies–Toon Boom Animate and Flash CS4–and approves of both, though he’s more enthusiastic about Toon Boom Animate: Toon Boom’s new Animate software has an animator-friendly set of features and more importantly, it’s price-competitive with Flash. The latter is currently making a serious run to overtake Adobe Flash as the preferred software package for 2D digital animators. In fact, I only became aware of the no-holds-barred battle in the past few months because two of our biggest advertisers have been the dueling companies: Adobe and Toon Boom. There’s a war brewing in the animation software world and Cartoon Brew is right in the thick of it.
