Pencil: Back to the Basics of Animaton

A great little free (although they certainly do accept donations) animating program you can download from the web is called Pencil-appropriate enough because it leads you back to the days of animating basics. This little program is the electronic age version of the old animator light table where one would sit and draw pencil rough character and bring them to life via traditional animating techniques. If you have the craving to jump into the wonderfully time consuming world of animation and don't want to be sidetracked with a lot of shortcut tweening functions offered in costly 2d animating programs  then my suggestion is to pick up Pencil. The drawing and animating tools are about as simple to learn as you can get but not in performance. This little prog can do wonders in keeping up with the bigger platform software packages. Made to function at its best with a graphics tablet Pencil still allows you to draw with a mouse (keep that hand steady) however tablets only allow the pressure sensitivity pen width function so be prepared. Pencil supports an audio track so you can put music or sound effects in your production however, one area it falls short is the ability to see a wave form on the timeline to help synch up your sound-ends up being a lot of trial and error with the audio.

I would have to say that Pencil is a great program to hone your animating skills but as far as full production goes, you could end up wasting a lot of time get it to perform as well as other programs like Toon Boom or Flash...but then again, Toon Boom isn't free, is it? Pencil is available for both PC and MAC platforms with an online manual and support forum so if you feel up to polishing those keyframing skills, go download Pencil today.

TVP Animation 9 Pro

the dashboard of TVP Animation 9 Pro

TVP Animation is not for the weak of heart. This software packages encompasses almost every tool you could imagine needing to create fantastic animations. The downside is, it encompasses almost every tool you could imagine needing to create fantastic animations. The learning curve on this one is somewhat steep, but once you get the hang of it, the versatility redeems the product and opens your imagination to hundreds of techniques to use for your next animation. This is not a beginner’s program and documentation on it takes some hunting (great tutorials on this one can be found here or here) but I feel the creators of TVP Animation 9 Pro  wanted to cover all the possibilities when it come to an animator’s needs for versatility.

using the blue pencil tool to rough in images

One of the best key features I found with TVP is the ability to use a blue pencil to sketch in your work, then drawing on top of that with a black pencil and with one command, erase all the blue pencil rough marks you made to clean up your images. In addition to this great still image tool, TVP offers light box mode, allowing you to view your series of images in an onion skin fashion with great control over opacity and color of the skinned images. To list all the tools of this complete animating software program would take a booklet, which may leave some frustrated, however since the earliest concept of this program in 1991 (with the release of TVPaint!), this French software package continues to polish it’s product. This is by far one of the best animating software programs I’ve seen to date.  If you go to their website you can download a trial copy of TVP but be prepared to dedicate a little time to learning it’s features.