A cheap animation program?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Well, I’ve got a hankering to make me some cartoons and I’d like to find a good program to let me do that. I can already do a mean animated gif and I think I need to graduate to something more complex.

I’m not looking for anything 3D; I don’t want to make Monsters Inc. 2 or anything. Just simple. South Park/Home Movies-style animation. I would like to add sound if I could.

I’ve got a 600Mhz Dell Inspiron laptop with 256MB of RAM. I suppose I could go up to $100.

Is this a pipe dream?

2

Ever tried HexaGreat 3-D?

Although not a true live animation program, it sure provides a lot of bang for zero bucks.

3

I personally the Jasc® Animation Shop™ 3 that comes with Paint shop pro 7, a 30-day trial of which can be downloaded at: http://www.jasc.com/products/psp/ While I use it to create the animated beginnings to music videos(which I make with Microsoft Movie Maker) among other things, I haven’t really noticed if there was sound or not, sorry. Anyway, if you like the program it usually costs around $109, but it’s frequently on sale for $80-90 in places like Best Buy, Ciricut City, Staples or Comp USA - although I got it for $25 on ebay myself, so there’s that option too. I really like that the preview version allows you to get a real sense of both programs, and that it’s only one download for both.

4

You may want to try: Blender

It’s supposed to be really good, and it’s free. It does 3D, but you don’t have to use it. Otherwise, for South Park style, have you thought about Flash? It is paid though, not sure how much.

5
      • Jasc Animation Shop is only for making animated GIF’s. I have seen gif “movies” dozens of megs long, but that still doesn’t amount to very much: gifs don’t have good built-in compression and they don’t support sound at all.
        — 2-D animation: [Flash] Macromedia Studio or Adobe LiveMotion are good for doing South Park type stuff. I know of no free programs.
        — For creating Disney- or Loony-Tunes style animation: ToonBoomStudio or Animation Stand. Both of these are far better for doing hand-drawn animation than the other two programs. T-B-S is also Flash-based but it does not support active scripting at all, so all you can make with it is simple movies (it doesn’t support interactivity of any kind) and exports to Flash or Quicktime, both of which have good file compression and support sound. Animation Stand is the pro-level software for hand-drawn animation, the “personal” version has a small view but is free off their website, last I heard. I have never tried it.
        ~
6

Many 3d animation programs like 3ds Max use an “Ink & Paint” renderer that lets you animate 3d objects as hand drawn cartoons. It’s expensive though unless you ahem “acquire” it through certain unnamed peer to peer file sharing networks.

7

Thanks for the suggestions, everybody! I downloaded the Toon Boom trial version, but at $330-plus I doubt I’ll be able to afford to upgrade to the full version. I’ll try some of the other programs this week. Thanks!

Now, off to price drawing tablets…

8

If complex is what you want, there’s just one word: Maya. This is the Oscar-winning 3D environment that’s been used in several theatrical releases, not just for obvious animation (such as Ice Age) but for all sorts of digital effects shots.

Maya is produced by Alias|Wavefront, and they’ve made available a subset of the full-on Maya called “Personal Learning Edition” for free. Yes, FREE. Free, as in free! Considering the full version sells for $6999.00 (yep, seven thousand bucks!) this is a steal.

You can get your copy at http://www.aliaswavefront.com/en/products/maya/ple/index.shtml

Caveat: Maya is a resource pig! It requires Win2000, XP, or MAC OS X and a minimum of 512 meg RAM and a hardware-accelerated OpenGL videocard. (Think “workstation-level” for this - Alias warns that the ubiquitous nVidia GeForce cards do not work too well) And of course, 3D rendering happily gobbles up every processor clock cycle it can get its teeth into.

9

I went out and took a look at ToonBoomStudio and am very impressed. Thanks DougC