Better still, as they work, they are developing and improving the tools they use and committing their code for everyone to use.

The Morevna Project, a small anime studio, is producing not only content but several tutorials about their tools, with everything being produced on an open source stack, released as Creative Commons. For this reason, it's ideal for a solo artist or a small animation team. Synfig Studio is a 'tweenless' animation system designed to speed up the animation process by using sprites and digital tweening rather than adding to the illustration workload. I can't review every animation application (at least, not all at once), so the last animation suite I'll look at this year is Synfig Studio. There are many more animation applications out there, not the least of which is Blender for 3D animation and all manner of hybrids (check out how some users are abusing the Grease Pencil tool for animation or the excellent Freestyle effect), GIMP Animation Plugin GAP, Tupi, the recently open-sourced OpenToonz, and many more.

In the past two months, I've covered Krita Animation for hand-drawn digital cel animation and StopGo for stop motion animation.

Welcome to the communityĪnimation is a robust field with a large number of specialties and an even larger number of tools for creating a particular look or style.

Pencil animation reviews