Animation Tools

Stickman enables you to create animated cartoons, without the need for any drawing skills. Instead of drawing, you can choose from a collection of enhanced stick figures that look like cartoon characters, and can be animated in the same way as stick figure animations, using control points. You can use full color backgrounds and choose from a variety of characters and objects that can be used in your animation. The program also includes a character editor (Elemento) that allows you to design your animation objects. Stickman supports multiple layers, adjustable camera angels, and more.

Pro Motion is a drawing and animation package for graphics that contain up to 256 colors. You can use it to create comics, logos, still images, presentations, clip-arts or game graphics as well as to spruce up your web-pages. It will help you to bring your ideas down to sketches easily. The wide range of powerful functions and tools will help you to create high quality animations. Even if you are not one of the talented artists this software can help you with rendering various color or graphic effects for you. The built in keyframer allows you to calculate animations in 3d-space without expecting you to draw something on your own. Professional artists will find useful tools like the light table, helping to create smooth animations (also known as onion skinning).

Nature Illusion Studio can transform your nature photos into realistic animations using visual and audible effects. You can add water effects (flow, ripple, waves) to select areas of the image, using a simple draw-on mask that will turn a static lake into a photo realistic animation while leaving the rest of the photo unchanged. Furthermore, you can add weather effects like snow and rain, as well as animated objects. The result can be previewed and then saved as screensaver, standalone executable, animated GIF or video file. The program works best with landscape images, especially waterfall and lake sceneries.

Easy GIF Animator helps you to create animated GIF images with ease. You can set a variety of options to customize your GIF animation with several effects. The interface allows for frame by frame preview and configuration. You can import images from a file or the clipboard, add text effects to selected frames preview the animation and finally optimized it for publishing on the web.

AnFX empowers anyone to create interactive java based animations with moving, fading, sizing, images, text and shapes. Add in some sound and you have a full multimedia experience. AnFX is an easy to learn tool kit that consists of a point and click design studio and a compact yet powerful player that loads transparently on your visitor s browsers. The results have to be seen to be believed. AnFX has been used to create Flash like, high impact animations, menus, simulations, advertising banners, presentations, on line learning content, product demonstrations, on line user manuals and more.

GIF Movie Gear makes building GIF animations easy, using a filmstrip that allows you to view all the frames of your animation at once. Youi have full control over all aspects of the animation, including frame delay, transparency and more. Other useful features include palette reduction, inter-frame optimization, animation resizing, support for Photoshop PSD, JPEG, AVI, BMP, and GIF files, and export to AVI format as an alternative to GIF.

Sqirlz is an image morphing program that enables you to bend, loop and twirl pictures and text. It can also animate the process and save the animation in .GIF or .AVI format. Any parts of an image can be separately deformed and animated to give complex and flowing motion effects. The software includes animated examples to get your started, however it still requires a good deal of practice and study of the help file in order to get productive. The evaluation version can be used 10 times.

Active GIF Creator enables you to create animated GIF images for the web. You can import image frames from a variety of formats, edit tham with the internal image editor or script editor, set transparency, delay, animation size and other common parameters. The program also allows you to apply several effects to selected frames (e.g. shake, ripple), add particles to the animation and insert text annotations. Other features include command-line features, web preview, GIF optimization, GIF comments and more. The animation can be saved as project, animated GIF, AVI video clip or several (static) image formats. In addition to GIF animations, you can also create simple buttons and image maps.

Animation from Movie enables you to convert .AVI videos into cartoon-like animation clips. Just load the file and preview the animation, adjust the detail and contrast and then record it to .AVI or SWF file. The animation is black and white and looks rather simplistic, it will not work very well with videos that have a lot of detail.

Amara Flash Intro and Banner Builder allows you to create text based Flash banners and intros. You can add multiple text items, each with individual effect, timing and text style, and also link them to URL links and Target Frames. The program includes ready-to-use text effects that can be customized in some parameters, and easily used for your designs. Amara Flash Intro and Banner Builder provides 3 step WYSIWYG interface with built-in preview. Does not require any Flash skills.

Amara Flash Photo Animation enables you to create virtual tours, using regular photos and a combination of panning and zooming effects that create a movie-like effect and allow the user to `walk through` each picture. You can combine multiple images into a slideshow, add URLs and more. The program offers an easy to use WYSIWYG interface that lets you design the zoom effects using simple mouse clicks and drag and drop to manipulate the effects. Additional features include optional background sound, customizable output size and background, 360 degree panning, transition time control and more.

The program allows to animated GIF images. In addition, it offers optimization of a graphic pallet allowing to reduce a file size. The program can interface with a scanner and includes several animation effects, 3D text options, a GiF Wizard and a Creation wizard.

KoolMoves is a web animation software that creates Flash movies and frames for animated gifs. It offers fully-featured drawing tools as well as the ability to import SWF Flash Movie files, FLV Flash Video files, vector clipart, MP3 and wav audio. KoolMoves can be used to create navigation systems, splash pages, flying logos, text effects, character animation, transition effects, drop shadows and much more. Shape fills include color gradient and bitmap. You can select from libraries of 67 action script based text effects, 28 web interfaces, 259 clip art items, 13 animated clip art movies, 70 buttons specially designed for Flash movies and more than 100 text effects templates. KoolMoves makes it easy to create a Flash movie - all you need is an idea. The program was designed by a professional animator to deliver powerful functionality with an easy to use interface.

Stop Motion Pro enables you to create stop motion and other animated films, using your webcam, digital video input device or digital camera (RAW and JPEG supported). Once you have connected the video source, you can simply take a capture for each frame in your animation, and the program will automatically stitch them into a video clip when you are ready. Other features include a frame editor, automatic time lapse capture, onionskinning, as well as Chromakey and rotoscope support. The resulting film can be exported to AVI or MPEG 1 format. A Junior Edition with less features (and without digital camera support) is available for $70 (same download).

ArtWaver enables you to add realistic nature and motion effects to your photos and convert them into animated displays that can be saved as screensavers, standalone EXE, GIF or Flash animation. You can add the animated effects by using a paint brush that applies the filter to the selected area, and add multiple layers to stack or enhance the effects. The current filters include nature effects such as rain, snow, water ripples, waves, clouds, smoke and others, as well as motion effects (blur, mirror etc.) and abstractions. Each effect can be customized to your preference.

MotionGIF is an all-in-one tool to create animated GIF files. It offers a user-friendly interface, that requires only a minimum learning curve as well as a built in player and IE preview option. You can easily manage your animation frames and choose from 21 built-in visual effects for frame transition. MotionGIF also comes with a built-in image editor for editing, resizing, high-quality zooming, cropping and more. Additional features include resizable objects, Images, text, shapes and brush lines and several productivity tools as well as multi-level undo options. MotionGIF offers a wealth of features at a very competitive price.

DigiCel FlipBook allows you to draw 2D animations with your mouse or tablet pen, or capture rough animation drawings under a camera and scan your final drawings into a traditional timing sheet where you can add a soundtrack and cut, copy, paste and drag and drop thumbnail images to adjust the timing and repeat cycles. The program also includes painting tools as well as options to pan, zoom, rotate, blur and dissolve. Other features include a light table option to stack up to 10 animations, animation clean-up, custom color palettes, Multi-Level Painting and more. The finished animation can be exported as movie file that can be shared via the Internet or played on your TV.

Video UserPic enabales you to create animated avatars from any video file by cropping and extracting a selected area from the video and converting it to a GIF file. You can select the frames to extract and freely position and resize the crop area to extract the portion of the video that you want to use.

Bannershop GIF Animator provides the easiest way to create, design and compress animated GIFs for the Web. Easy to use, visual interface lets you design your animation directly in the program by using vector graphics, image retouching and anti-aliased text edit tools. Animations can be also quickly assembled from pre-created images. Powerful optimization engine significantly reduces GIF file size.

Advanced GIF Animator is a tool for creating animated GIF images. It offers a built-in editor with basic editing and paint tools, as well as a button generator and tool to create HTML image maps for your designs. Other features include GIF optimization, image effects and support for GIF transparency.

CoffeeCup GIF Animator allows you to create animated GIFs for your Web pages easily. To use it, you can first browse images in a folder by previewing a thumbnail, and then drag and drop images into your animation. CoffeeCup GIF Animator can convert JPEG and BMP graphics to GIFs automatically, as well as import and export to AVI and SWF (Flash) files. The HTML source is generated for easy insertion into Web pages and the program can also create favorite folders for quick recall, view both frames and animation simultaneously, export frames to single images, and view thumbnails with size and dimension information.

Zoner GIF Animator is a tool tool for creating animated graphics with options to optimize the output animations and thereby reduce file size and download time. Features include bitmap import (PCX, TIF, WPG, MAC, TGA, ICO, BMP, JPG, DIB, RLE, PNG, BMI), animation import (FLI, FLC, AVI), internal support for text frames including advanced editing functions, editing of individual animation frames (using MS Paint), drag & drop, support for all frame-refresh methods, definition of animation borders and locking and frame printing. Additional features include support for "windows message box" banners, that allows you to create thos fake message box banners without the need for any third party editor. You can also apply alpha transparency to frames, generate textures, rotate, resize and transform frames and more.

Ulead GIF Animator is a fast and easy-to-use GIF animation tool that delivers great features for powerful animation composition, editing, special effects and optimization in a single package. Control all aspects of animation composition with scrolling text, creative banner text effects, animation effects, transition effects, color effects, Photoshop plugin filter support and moving sprites. Combine multiple animations with animation merging and embedding and much more... For animations on the Web, download speed is of the essence. GIF Animator includes industry-leading optimization to deliver the best animation at the smallest size.