I need an animation software.

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Okay so here's the deal. I'm an aspiring filmmaker who wants to get to college and I'm REALLY interested in learning how to animate. So know the problem is I don't know any good animation softwares to use. So does anyone know of any animation software that I can use? It has to be something easy to use and easy to learn how to use, not to mention decently high-quality animations. So can anyone help me?

EDIT: Sorry for not specifying. The type of animation softwares I'm looking for are the kinds that can allow me to do 2D and/or 3D.

Last edited by ashmeister on 31 Jan 2010, 4:35 am, edited 1 time in total.

Hmmm. We both need more info.

Blender is a good renderer for all kinds of real looking stuff and it's GPL (free).
Poser is famous for making people like sims and my avatar.

GIF animator is the simplest kind of PC animation but has no sound,
and I don't know how to add sounds to GIF. It can work with renders,
paint, and photos (thus flick pads and claymation). All you need to do
is save pictures and put them in order.
MJPEG maybe similar and can contain sound,
but I only know of it from a toy movie camera.

The cussy South Park kind of animation if easy to do if you can program graphics.
Liberty BASIC is the easiest graphic Windows BASIC but I wonder if it is compatible
with VISTA. It's old and it might not even work right on XP.

Flick pads are a deck of card sized paper glued together on one edge.
That is a simple cheap non-computer way to animate.
You can usually trace the previous picture with some motion related changes
one page at a time with a pencil. You then flip through the pages to see the
animation. Animated GIFs work similarly by showing you the pictures fast in
order.

SHOCKWAVE aka FLASH is an animation program for the web.
It is probably what you should use to animate if you know how to animate
anything. It is the only thing I know of that is now considered "qualified".

FPS Game engines may be useful for animating but not easy. I don't know
if flash requires Programming, but Game engines certainly do, unless all
you want to do is draw a "dungeon map" in the level editor and then walk
around in it.

SHOCKWAVE/FLASH is probably the most useful choice I know of.

There are many ways to do it but some of the options used to be easy and
Windows made it all harder for no good reason. Animation software I wrote
all by myself is not compatible with it at all. I even used to do 3D animations
very easily but there is no very easy software today that I know of.

Disney may have simple and easy and fun animation apps, if ANYONE does.

MORE IDEAS PLEASE!

I don't know of any specifically but I found this one for 2D animation. It looks simple for starting out. Maybe check the gallery to see if it's sophisticated enough for what you're looking for.

http://www.pencil-animation.org/

Here are a few others I found.

http://my.smithmicro.com/win/anime/index.html
http://www.3dmagix.com/
http://www.toonboom.com/main/

A youtube video you might be interested in. I wasn't looking for it, but thought of you when I saw it.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5d4pPOlfoo[/youtube]

I don't know why these aren't linked together so I'll go ahead and post them in case you're interested in seeing it.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDScLm61Qhk[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_RcC5tvs1k[/youtube]

This mentions an animation software program.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bei_iuo47g[/youtube]

Here's the Maya animation software.

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/pc ... d=13577897

These are free:
http://www.anim8or.com/main/index.html
http://www.blender.org/
http://download.cnet.com/Synfig-Studio/ ... 55202.html


Sorry for all these posts. It's probably not what you were looking for but hope something was helpful.

Wishing you good luck

Y'know what's funny? The fact that I'm currently trying to use Autodesk Maya, but mine's the 2008 version.

also, Bryce 5.5 is a landscape program, with built-in animation, if you want to do the background parts.
I think Daz Studio will do animation, but not sure (hey, it's free, so no harm done...

anim8tor I have. It's as bare-bones as you can get (the program would fit on a 1.44 floppy...uh...floppies, you see back in the day, they had this removable mediia called...

Poser will do animation, but that costs money.

Bryce is for landscape design.

Maya
3DSmax
Softimage XSI
Lightwave
etc all can do Animation/Modeling.

3DSmax is the game industry stranded and Maya is film. Maya is also very hard to learn if you have no idea what your doing.

Animation Master from Hash inc. is a good alternitive for some if you don't have $2000-$8000 for industry stuff. If your a student try Studica.com or such, you can get 85%+ discounts on software.

Houdini is supposed to be incredibly powerful but it retails at over $15,000 or something crazy like that

I loathe blender.

first of all you need to specify what kind of animation do you want to make. 3d and stop motion are diff'rent beasts mazn.

Hey I use Maya everyday in my work! if you need help you can ask me... ^^

Maya is good. I haven't done any animation, but I have made these buildings

If you are a student, then you can sign up at Autodesk's Student Community and download it for free. for learning purposes only though.

If you are an aspiring film maker then you will have to drop the easy to use / learn prerequisite, because there is a lot to learn to make a decent film - if you start off on the "easy" route then you will condemn yourself to making Youtube videos.

Pencil http://www.pencil-animation.org/ gets quite good reviews, but Synfig http://synfig.org/ seems to be a much more capable application. There are some good tutorials on the wiki http://synfig.org/wiki/Category:Tutorials

Stopmotion works very well, and stores hierarchical animation sets, although the interface is a bit clunky http://developer.skolelinux.no/info/stu ... topmotion/ - add the Gimp Animation Package and ImageMagick for some really capable frame manipulation.