Animation Software

Try these free alternatives – sometimes a bit rougher than the commercial packages, but the price is right and the features are all there.

Pencil – has been written by animators for animators.  It has one of the best user interfaces for hand-drawn animation in the computer.  The original developer has since forked this to open source.

KToon – Adventurous Linux users may wish to try this package.  KToon has had a rough time – it appears to be a fairly well-designed piece of software, but it has floundered in development.  One fork, called Tupi, seems to be somewhat healthy.

Synfig – Synfig is aimed at the vector artist, but designed for animation, not web banners.  An influx of cash and a Kickstarter seem to have breathed new life into a great project that needed some attention.

Blender – is an open-source 3DCG environment that can produce sophisticated, professional results.  There are loads of free tutorials, content, plugins, and extras for Blender, plus great support for practically any platform.

Make Human is a project designed to create realistic-looking 3D human models.  It is an open source analog for Poser.

StopMojo is a Java-based animation program designed for stop-motion. It can also be used for pencil-testing animation drawings.

• These days maybe all you need to do stop-motion is a DSLR and a copy of Entangle

• Then there is Linuxstopmotion.