What 2D Animation Software should I use?

Mark Madness

I'm a 3D Animator looking to practice 2D animation as a hobby and possibly use in my career. What software do you all recommend I invest in? So far, I've looked at Adobe Animate, Toon Boom Harmony, and Synfig Studio.

Blond

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/krita/krita-2016-lets-make-text-and-vector-art-awesome

Go down and wtach the video, you can do some pretty solid things with it. I've tried it myself (it's free btw).

But the best alternative for now might be Blender and the grease pencil:

http://lesterbanks.com/2016/03/blender-grease-pencil-2-5d-animation/

Amazing uh? Imagine all the advantages of a 3D envirronment based software with all the tools you need for 2d animation.!!

aesir

Hi!  It depends what kind of art you want to make honestly.

You want to make this for example?

Use after effects and photoshop

RN

I found the grease pencil animation in Blender experimental for now, there's very little you can do with it (you have to manually paint in fills, you need to convert it to geometry to be able to render it, for example. It feels like something that was added on top rather than designed from the start for 2D animation).

I don't have experience with Synfig. If you're looking for another open source alternative there's the latest version of OpenToonz. It's not without some small problems on usability but it has raster and vector levels (level = layer), mesh warping, multiplane camera, node-based compositing etc. Some people have been doing some cool stuff with it.
At the very least you can sketch and flip frames with it comfortably.

Mark Madness

Thanks everyone. All this information helps. I'll start looking into all these options. Thanks again.