But it is still a capable tool for 2d animation with the help of plugins like Flanimate.Animate To Harmony: The Independent Animator’s Guide to Toon BoomĪ love letter to a piece of software seems a little daft given my dual (dueling, on occasion) roles as both animation freelancer/director and researcher/writer It’s obvious to many that, leagues ahead of the software itself, it’s the artist and ingenuity of a core idea that makes an animated project a success. And Blender does perfect 2d cut out FK/IK-based character animation as well.īut Flash/Animate is much easier to get along with initially for 2d animators.Īnimate CC will never recapture its former glory in this market. There really is no comparison, not with grease pencil improving at the rate it is (2.81!) and the seamless 2d/3d workflow, compositor, effects, and so on. Now, as for a direct comparison between Blender with its new 2d animation capabilities and Animate CC? Well, Blender wins 9 out of 10. Too much water under the bridge.įlash had the momentum going for it in the 2d broadcast animation market, but Adobe lost it.
And Adobe itself is responsible for mismanaging that aspect and market of Flash, although they are trying to improve Animate and recapture part of the 2d broadcast animation market. For example, the Japanese studio Khara behind Evangelion made the switch to Blender.Īnyway, what I am trying to say here: Flash/Animate CC is, for the most part, already a somewhat marginalized tool in today’s 2d animation industry. Toonboom rules the Western side of 2d broadcast animation production (Disney, for example).īut Blender’s 2d/3d animation combo is making waves here and there in this industry. Various Japanese studios use OpenToonz in combination with ClipStudio Paint.
It also depends on the type of animation: hand-drawn frame-by-frame is often done with the help of TV Paint. For example, Futurama was produced with the commercial version of OpenToonz with some IK-based cutout character work finished in Moho Pro. More often than not a combination of tools is used, and not just a single one. Which effectively killed access to the superior CS6 version.Īnd believe you me when I tell you how unbelievably crap the latest version is (CC 2019).įor these and many other reasons (support, for example) most animation studios doing 2d animation that used to produce with Flash have switched to other alternatives. The trouble is, Adobe made it extremely difficult for animators to access older versions, if not impossible: this year Adobe decided that their users no longer will have access to any version older than the latest two releases.
(Look for the Flanimate tools here: Great set of tools for professional animators looking to do their animation in Flash/Animate.) CS6 has by far the best performance for animation.
Right now the best version of Flash/Animate is surprisingly Flash CS6, with the addition of the excellent free and open source Flanimate character animation tools. The bone tool has been broken and useless for production since its very inception. Performance of 2d animation in Animate CC has gone down the drain, and the new animation tools introduced in the latest two versions are buggy, limited, and really alpha quality to be very kind. The trouble is that the latest versions are…
Only these past few years has Adobe invested any real effort in Animate/Flash to improve its market value as an animation tool. In the past Flash was one of the standard weapons in this market, but Adobe allowed Flash to wither and put it on life support for a long time. Blender’s 2d animation is the new kid on the block.įact is that even if Toonboom had paid Adobe to ruin Flash/Animate as a tool for broadcast and feature film 2d animation, they couldn’t have done a better job. When we limit this discussion to pure broadcast 2d animation production and 2d feature animation production, Adobe has more to fear from Toonboom Harmony and TVPaint, the open sourced OpenToonz, and CelAction 2D (of Peppa pig fame), Moho Pro. Even mobile platforms app development with Air. First you would have to define the market Animate CC is used for, because Animate not only is used for broadcast animation, but also for animated web banners, and web games.