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CreateStudio is an on-premise video-making and editing software that helps video creators, social media marketers and YouTubers create doodles, animations and explainer videos. The platform enables developers to include emojis, shadows or borders and add 3...Read more about CreateStudio
Renderforest is an animation software designed to help businesses utilize built-in templates to create videos, graphics, websites, logos and mockups. The platform enables designers to upload files and preview edited designs on a unified interface. Creator...Read more about Renderforest
Adobe After Effects is a motion graphics platform that helps businesses design animated videos and streamline visual effects (VFX) processes. It enables graphic designers to store digital content in a centralized repository, share files with internal and e...Read more about Adobe After Effects
Adobe Creative Cloud is a suite of photography, video, design and user experience tools that helps businesses create, source and publish content across devices. It includes desktop and cloud applications such as Adobe Photoshop, InDesign, and Premiere Rush...Read more about Adobe Creative Cloud
Autodesk Navisworks is a project review software designed to improve coordination, collaboration, and construction planning across various industries, including architecture, engineering, and construction. The software allows users to integrate and review ...Read more about Navisworks
Mango Animation Maker (Mango AM) is a versatile and user-friendly animation software that allows users to create stunning animated videos and GIFs. With its intuitive drag-and-drop interface, users can easily add text, images, audio, and video to their pro...Read more about Mango Animation Maker
Vyond is the effortless, all-in-one AI video creation platform for business. Vyond provides everything needed to communicate better, including an AI-powered instant video maker (Vyond Go) and a full-featured video editor (Vyond Studio). Better — and faster...Read more about Vyond
An all-in-one visual and motion design tool called Artboard Studio makes it easier to produce effective and persuasive marketing materials. Professionals and novices alike should have Artboard Studio because of its user-friendly interface, variety of temp...Read more about Artboard Studio
Mixamo is a 3D animation solution that can animate 3D characters for film and video games. Mixamo provides a vast collection of high-quality 3D characters as well as hundreds of character animations, Mixamo ensures that characters are ready-to-use with aut...Read more about Mixamo
Banuba SDK is a premade module that adds advanced augmented reality features to apps. Users can integrate it quickly and get a market-ready product faster than when building from scratch, saving time and money on development. Banuba SDK includes AR masks...Read more about Face AR SDK
BrioVR is a cloud-based 3D visualization software designed to help individuals and businesses in e-commerce, real estate, advertising, architecture, industrial design, games, education and automotive industries create virtual reality, augmented reality and...Read more about BrioXR
PandaSuite helps designers, entrepreneurs, students, project managers and developers create applications. Users can preview instantly, test within mobile devices and share it with users via links. PandaSuite drives user engagement with animations, drag-an...Read more about PandaSuite
TINT Virtual Try-On Platform allows to virtually try on thousands of beauty products that look lifelike on any skin, under different lighting, and even on low-end smartphones. Its inbuilt AI makeup advisor recommends cosmetics, glasses and jewelry and thei...Read more about TINT Virtual Try-On Platform
Introbrand is an animation solution that helps small businesses, clubs and educational institutes create product, service, marketing and personal branding videos. It allows staff members to utilize multiple pre-designed templates to build videos for events...Read more about Introbrand
Expressive Animator is an SVG vector animation software that helps designers create and export animated icons, logos, and illustrations. It provides professional vector tools and keyframe-based timeline animation features for bringing motion to vector grap...Read more about Expressive Animator
The MakeStoryboard app has won the favor of animators and video designers alike. The app has an easy-to-use user interface (UI) with a drag-and-drop ability, custom text fields, notes, image uploading capability, and an in-built sketchpad. You can work alo...Read more about MakeStoryBoard
SVGator is an online animation software that lets users create animations without any coding skills. Besides the SVG vector format, there are many other export formats available: Lottie JSON, GIF, .JS, .DART, multiple raster image formats and video format...Read more about SVGator
**Back to School 2022** We believe education happens not only in schools. With the right tools in hand, learning can take place at any time and anywhere. Gear up, visit Kdan Creative Store to find out the best learning tool for you! First-time subscribers...Read more about Animation Desk
CRYENGINE is a game engine that helps professionals develop games using visuals, sandbox, animation, artificial intelligence and audio editing tools. It offers built-in buoyancy and water simulation module, which allows users to deploy water simulation wit...Read more about CRYENGINE
3ds Max is a cloud-based animation software that provides businesses with tools to create, model and render 3D design visualizations. Professionals can create procedural open shading language (OSL) maps and utilize spline tools to animate geometrical desig...Read more about 3ds Max
Touchify is a cloud solution to create, spread and measure interactive communication. Touchify allows marketing and sales teams to expand their digital presence and deliver impactful communication media, whatever the company's size....Read more about Touchify
AutoCAD is a 2D and 3D design and drafting platform for architects, engineers, construction professionals, field technicians and contractors, which supports 2D drafting, drawing and annotation tools, alongside 3D modeling and visualization technology. With...Read more about AutoCAD
iClone is an animation solution that helps businesses generate animated videos for online games and films. The application enables professionals to configure settings to adjust visuals, lightings and scenes as per business requirements. The platform allo...Read more about iClone
Maya is an animation tool for 3D modeling, animation, visual effects, and rendering. With Maya, you can create any character or creature imaginable. Users can design cool virtual reality games or popular TV shows or movies or even animate models with Maya'...Read more about Maya
Canva's AI Photo Editor is a versatile tool that allows users to enhance their images with advanced AI-powered editing capabilities. This photo editor enables users to quickly add, erase, and transform their photos with ease, saving time compared to tradit...Read more about Canva AI Photo Editor
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Buyers Guide
This detailed guide will help you find and buy the right animation software for you and your business.
Last Updated on March 16, 2023Animations are important for storytelling. Whether you’re in the gaming, entertainment, retail, architecture, or engineering industry, you can use animations to create attractive visuals for marketing your products or services. Animated videos also find an application in the e-learning industry to help visualize concepts and make learning easier for students.
Creating animations, however, is a time-consuming and complex process, and the complexity varies based on your desired animation type (e.g., 2D, 3D) and quality. Several underlying functions, even in simple animations, are effort-intensive. These include generating character skeletons, creating transitions, and assembling animated frames.
That’s where animation software comes into the picture. It offers features such as prebuilt templates, automatic light and color scheme adjustment, motion capture, and rendering to help automate the process of creating animations.
In this buyers guide, we explain the features and benefits of animation software as well as the considerations and market trends you should keep in mind when purchasing the software.
Here's what we'll cover:
What is animation software?
Animation software is a software tool that automates the process of creating animated feature films, cartoons, GIFs, whiteboard animation videos, and other media. It allows design artists to create an animated video frame by frame, either from scratch or by using a prebuilt template. It also lets them import media files from other applications to add music or additional effects to their animations.
The software automates functions such as rendering videos, adding transitions, adjusting the background, syncing the audio, and creating bone structures to help reduce the time and effort required to create animations. It’s used in various industries including education, entertainment, advertising, marketing, manufacturing, and medical.
Prebuilt animation templates in Vyond (Source)
Common features of animation software
It’s easier to select software when you know what its common features are. Let’s look at some of the common features of animation tools.
2D and 3D modeling | Access 2D and 3D animation features such as rigging, vector animation, bone tools, animation curves, automatic weight calculation, auto-meshing, and inverse kinematics. Use prebuilt templates to speed up the process. |
Animations and transitions | Create animations from scratch, or use prebuilt templates. Add graphical and media objects, modify the appearance of the objects, and synchronize them with the audio. Use built-in transitions or create your own. Define the sequence of transitions, or use autogenerated transitions. |
Media imports | Import pictures, videos, graphics, audio, and other media. Customize the media, adjust its quality, add audio and transitions, modify the size, and much more. |
Prebuilt templates | Choose from a collection of prebuilt templates that you can edit, rearrange, and add your own branding to. Change the text, font, color, size, and other parameters as required. |
Rendering | Assemble all animated scenes (2D animation or 3D graphics) in a sequence of individual frames to generate a video clip. Convert keyframes or simulated models into their final appearance by adding lighting, effects, transitions, textures, and more. |
Video editing | Edit video backgrounds, color schemes, fonts, text, frame hierarchies, and more. Edit any imported media to fine-tune the characters, motion animation, lighting, etc. |
What type of buyer are you?
Before evaluating animation program options, you should assess the kind of buyer you are. The majority of buyers in this market belong to one of these categories:
Buyers looking for a professional-grade tool: These buyers include professional animation artists who need advanced software to create high-quality content. They need an animation app that can help create virtual reality scenes, animated films, motion graphics, animated characters, and graphical environments. These buyers should opt for an advanced animation tool that supports 3D modeling, rendering, character animation, bitmap drawing, and simulation, among other features. These advanced features will help them develop high-quality, professional-grade animations, which may be difficult to achieve with a regular tool.
Buyers looking for a tool suited to beginners: These buyers include animators or artists who’re just starting out. They need an animation maker that has basic functionality and will help them learn the ropes of designing animations. These buyers can opt for a free or low-cost animation tool that provides educational materials or training on creating animations. 2D animations, vector graphics, prebuilt animations, motion tracking support, and built-in character templates are some recommended features for this buyer category.
Benefits of animation software
Here are the key benefits of choosing an animation platform:
Reduced time: Animation software tools help reduce the time it takes you to create animated media. Features such as prebuilt animation templates, character templates, and built-in transitions automate the process and make it easier to develop high-quality media, such as 2D animation, 3D animation, motion graphic, and stop motion animation.
Better quality: An animation software tool helps improve the output quality by letting you adjust lighting, shades, background colors, visual effects, and more. You can edit the animations for enhancing keyframes, scenes, or characters. You also have an option to highlight details; enhance the color schemes; and add music, audio, or voice-over to further enhance the animation quality.
Market trends to understand
Here are the latest animation software market trends that you should be aware of:
Collaborative cloud-based workflows are improving communication among teams. Producing animated movies requires as much teamwork as any other activity. Collaborative cloud-based workflows help ensure animation projects and related files can be easily shared within the team as well as with other departments. They allow for more efficient and easier access to resources, which facilitates collaboration. They also support digital communication via features such as instant messaging and live chat.
Increasing use of artificial intelligence in animation production. Artificial intelligence is being increasingly used as middleware for animation tools. The process of creating animations is time-consuming and involves a steep learning curve. Artificial intelligence technology can speed up the process by introducing a middle layer that automates much of the groundwork that goes into creating animations. It can, for instance, develop the skeleton of characters for human motion simulation to reduce the time and effort required to create animations.
Note: The application selected in this article is an example to show a feature in context and is not intended as an endorsement or a recommendation. It has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable at the time of publication.