Style capabilities
What’s your animation style – cheerfully silly or stylishly cool?
When choosing an animation program, your primary consideration will be what style and level of sophistication you’re aiming for. If you’re thinking of producing cartoon-style animations you’ll no doubt choose a different package from when you’re making a more serious and realistic-looking reel.
Synfig is a 2D drawing program designed for cartoons with advanced features for creating realistic environments. Indeed, it’s well suited to putting together graphic novels. Blender is a 3D environment where you model your scene rather than draw. The style can go from the cartoonish to the photorealistic.
Pencil2D has a simple interface and has very little in the way of helping you animate, although keyframes are used. This software is very much a frame-by-frame animation package, and the keyframes functions will help create a smooth movement across the screen.
Tupi is 2D and very much aimed at drawing cartoons. There are a number of pencils and drawing tools, but the light effects and other rendering tools are lacking. You need to be an accomplished artist to get the most from this program. The storyboard function could make this the perfect planning software, though.
GIMP has a lot of advanced graphics functions that you can use to make beautiful graphics. However, animating your characters isn’t the easiest, since most of the work will be done frame-by-frame. GIMP can help with things like creating spinning globes and other animation effects, and there are a host of scripts that create animations from existing artwork or graphics.