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Description
This is an alert about the coolest animation program, ever!

Last night I saw a really neat spin-kick in an anime movie I was watching. It made the animator in me sit up and want to try out something like it. So, about an hour or so later, I had this.

That quick? Yup!

Back in the day, I would have had to get a stack of paper, scribble away, put it all under the super-8 stand, then wait for the film to come back from the lab. About two days.

Then there was Flash. With Flash I would have had to figure out which things have to become "symbols", deal with the weird subtractive vector drawing system, and them struggle with the non-intuitive interface until I either got what I wanted or gave up in disgust. About 3 to 5 days.

But now there's "Pencil": [link]

Pencil is free. Yep, you don't have to spend big bucks or put on an eye-patch to get it. It has layers (both bitmap and vector), onion-skinning, variable frame-rate, fill-to-sub-layer, and sound! The catch is that this software is still in development (version 0.4.4) so you'll have to put up with some bugs and quirks. But even with the little headaches, it's light-years beyond any other program out there for pure functionality.

Quick pencil test? No problem. The above was done on my slow little netbook*: This program is not a resource-hog. All you animator types out there should go grab a copy... and if you like it, think about donating some bucks to these guys. If the program is this good at version 0.4, think how awesome it will be at version 1.0!

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* Made into a GIF in ImageReady. Pencil outputs Flash(SWF), MOV, and sequential images.

Description
This is an alert about the coolest animation program, ever!

Last night I saw a really neat spin-kick in an anime movie I was watching. It made the animator in me sit up and want to try out something like it. So, about an hour or so later, I had this.

That quick? Yup!

Back in the day, I would have had to get a stack of paper, scribble away, put it all under the super-8 stand, then wait for the film to come back from the lab. About two days.

Then there was Flash. With Flash I would have had to figure out which things have to become "symbols", deal with the weird subtractive vector drawing system, and them struggle with the non-intuitive interface until I either got what I wanted or gave up in disgust. About 3 to 5 days.

But now there's "Pencil": [link]

Pencil is free. Yep, you don't have to spend big bucks or put on an eye-patch to get it. It has layers (both bitmap and vector), onion-skinning, variable frame-rate, fill-to-sub-layer, and sound! The catch is that this software is still in development (version 0.4.4) so you'll have to put up with some bugs and quirks. But even with the little headaches, it's light-years beyond any other program out there for pure functionality.

Quick pencil test? No problem. The above was done on my slow little netbook*: This program is not a resource-hog. All you animator types out there should go grab a copy... and if you like it, think about donating some bucks to these guys. If the program is this good at version 0.4, think how awesome it will be at version 1.0!

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* Made into a GIF in ImageReady. Pencil outputs Flash(SWF), MOV, and sequential images.