What do you use for animating?

I am very bad at animating, art stuffs, and have no plan to become an animator. But developing a game by myself requires some skill of animating. The graphic that I can make are just simple shapes with some fancy effects on them, using Firework.

So what do you use for making art?

I use GIMP for most things, MyPaint for landscapes, and MakeHuman for figure references. I've tried a variety of tools for animations, but I keep coming back to GIMP.

Typically for humans, I'll render a 3D body with MakeHuman and draw clothes on by hand. I can't claim to be a great artist, though, so I can't really defend that's a good idea. It seems to work okay for low resolution, though.

Poser for a lot of initial models and basic shapes. Then I change the models and their textures to suit my needs.
- Single point light is used for making things look like comic book drawings (i.e. my avatar with some cel-shading) or anime
- Two point light gives more of a shadowed effect if you want to have more of an ambience
- Three point gives more of a claymation type feel
- I haven't figured out exactly how to make realistic lighting

In Poser, you can move and set up animation. For use in stencyl, I just export the animation as image files and import them directly in.

I use Jpixel.

Animation I'm still learning. What I do is always look for the best references in my area.

SIMPSONS PIXELS - Paul Robertson and Ivan Dixon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIZ_gDOrzGk

Blog Paul Robertson
http://probertson.tumblr.com/

5 tips for making great animations for 2D games - Eric Caoili
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/176663/5_tips_for_making_great_animations_for_2D_games.php

12 Principles of Animation - AlanBeckerTutorials
(Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston in their book "The Illusion of Life".)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haa7n3UGyDc&list=PL-bOh8btec4CXd2ya1NmSKpi92U_l6ZJd

Making Fluid and Powerful Animations For Skullgirls - Mariel Cartwright
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mw0h9WmBlsw

Game Feel: Why Your Death Animation Sucks - Nicolae Berbece
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmSAG51BybY

I use spine - then output as png sequence, (I've played withe the spine runtime, but it's a bit buggy - hopefully in the future!!)

For 3d stuff, keyshot, again render as png sequence.

Touching up done in  Affinity photo.

Thank you a lot. I will look up all of these. Looks like it will take a while to get skilled.

Spriter Pro is quite nice.. Its on Steam and comes up in Sales from time to time.

I just started using Creature (http://creature.kestrelmoon.com/). The procedural motors alone are worth the price -- you can literally take a piece of static art and animate within minutes using pre-built bone rig templates, mesh deforms and procedural motors. You can export to a spritesheet, but they also have multiple runtimes including a Haxe runtime (https://github.com/kestrelm/Creature_Haxe).

Here is a link to the bone motors tutorial:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3Kg8ESUE4A

I use Apple Motion, a downloadable graphics app for Mac OS X which is ideal for creating simple titling animations for your business or independent projects. The updated versions include more complex features like 3D-compositing, vector painting and motion tracking.

I often use Autodesk Maya  . Maya is the industry standard 3D software, used in most large studios. Maya, Softimage and 3D Max all belong to Autodesk and word quite similarly. Choosing one is a matter of personal preference.

Here following are the Supported platforms that you may need to consider:

Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8
Mac OS X
Linux

Why not try Cinema 4D? It is a motion graphics artist’s best friend. This is a 3D program for the After Effects user. Very intuitive, and after a the recent release of Cineware it works directly with After Effects without the need to render first.

This would not however be my first choice for serious 3D production since it is designed from the ground up with motion graphics in mind, but it might be yours

Windows Vista,7,8 and Mac OSX are 2 Supported platforms.

I have been using Toon Boom Animate Pro 3.  here below are my comments:
Pros: Great for tradition animation
Cons: intermediate learning curve, interface is kind of dated

Does anyone use blender for animation?  i was looking into it...

WOW creature and sprite bump look amazing

Why not try Cinema 4D? It is a motion graphics artist’s best friend. This is a 3D program for the After Effects user. Very intuitive, and after a the recent release of Cineware it works directly with After Effects without the need to render first.

This would not however be my first choice for serious 3D production since it is designed from the ground up with motion graphics in mind, but it might be yours

Windows Vista,7,8 and Mac OSX are 2 Supported platforms.

I use C4D. It's really powerful AND user friendly.

Does anyone use blender for animation?  i was looking into it...

WOW creature and sprite bump look amazing

I looked at blender but found it really difficult to use. I'm sure that once you manage to get past the UI it's excellent, but there's a steep learning  curve.