Computers > Animation Software
Animation Software: News, Information and Reviews
Want to try before you buy, or looking for something simple but functional with no strings attached? Here's a list of various animation software packages available for download. Some are entirely free, some are shareware, some are free with limited functions (with more available after paying), and some are free trials that either expire after time or come with certain critical options disabled.
If you're publishing for the web, you'll need to be able to insert your SWF file into your website, right? Here's a quick guide that will help you figure out how.
Try out a version of the classic 'Magic 8-Ball' created using Flash ActionScripting.
In this lesson we'll cover how to create a new blank movie file in Flash MX, and the tools and steps involved in making your first simple animation using motion tweening.
The walk cycle is one of the most important animation techniques to master, but you can simplify it a bit in Flash even when drawing each individual frame, whether in whole or in part. This basic stick-figure walk-cycle demonstrates the basic ideas and discusses key concepts of figures in motion.
In this lesson, we're going to learn how to "cheat' on making detailed animated characters in Flash without actually drawing every frame.
If you want to add actual expression and realistic mouth-movements to your animation, it helps to study how the shape of the mouth changes with each sound. These ten basic phoneme shapes can match almost any sound of speech, in varying degrees of expression--and with the in-between frames moving from one to the other, are remarkably accurate.
This is a simple, animated Flash menu that drops down/expands when your mouse rolls over the menu header.
Whether you draw your 2D animations traditionally or digitally, there are some skills essential to both incarnations of the craft. One is the ability to draw simple but effective animation characters with clean, easy lines and basic shapes.
Take this quiz to see what type of animated story suits you best.
Rather than working with simple shapes and reusable objects, let's work with the techniques used in cinematic animation: hand-drawing each frame using keyframing and in-betweening techniques to describe progressive motion.
Cylekx 2.9 is bland, unimpressive addition to the line-up of second-tier graphics and animation programs.
Frustrated by the dearth of inexpensive animation solutions compatible with the robust and powerful Macintosh platform? Take a look at this list of five software packages that will let you animate for $250 or far less.
The term "computer animation" itself rather broadly covers a wide variety of genres and applications, though the simplest way to break it down is into the categories of 2D and 3D animation. The tutorials provided here have been grouped into the categories of 2D and 3D animation, before being subdivided by skill level to walk, step-by-step, through the basics of creating your own animations
In this set of tutorials, we'll just be taking a look at the environment of 3D Studio Max version 4.26, and helping you to get more familiar with the tool panels, how to navigate them, and how to use the sets of basic tools you'll need to begin animating.
Creating a detailed, full-color character animation using traditional frame-by-frame methods is a long and at times difficult process, even in Flash. For this lesson we're going to take the first step and rough-sketch our basic motion for a simple action, using block shapes representing a character we wish to animate.