Animation

[clynder:sound]

Hi All,

Can anyone recommend a package to do animation work?
I'll be using a Mac, and I'm totally inexperienced but want to mess around. It's not so much for feature films, but more for animated projections during a live music set.
I would need something versatile, user friendly and cheap. There surely has to be something out there is this current technological climate?

Cheers

 

[FrostBlue]

Hi,
Can you please explain what kind of animation you wanna do?

Simple modelling and animation
Characters and creatures
Visual Effects with particles and dynamics,etc.

I will give you some options below about which I know and some you might wanna look into

For 3D :

Blender (blender.org) - Good for modelling,shading and rendering almost anything.Impressive particle,cloth and dynamics systems. Can do character work in the latest Alpha version but takes a lot of setup time. Get both the 2.50 and older version as some things don't work in the latest version but it has some updated tools.

Price : free opensource

Houdini (sidefx.com) - Great for FX and particles,dynamics,etc. Can do almost anything you can imagine under the sun and some beyond that too. Though modelling and animation is not the smoothest as in no. of steps needed to get the result. Imagine a tank with all the things you need in a vehicle except the sleek speed of a race car and you have Houdini.

Price : Free download of Apprentice version and $ 99 for taking away the watermark and rendering HD

The advantage of these apps is that they have integrated compositors in them so you can manipulate your images for colour correction and such.Heck Blender even has an editing module.

Other things you might wanna look at...

Softimage,Cinema 4D,Modo about which I don't know much but they may have affordable versions.

For 2D :

I have only tried Pencil (www.pencil-animation.org) ,pretty basic but with some cleanup in other free packages will get the job done.
And maybe PAP (Plastic AnimationPaper).

Goodluck.