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Free Multi OS Animation Application
By Martin English | April 17, 2008
I found this on makeuseof.com – Pencil is a free drawing and animation application that supports Mac OS X, Windows and Linux. Currently, still in beta but it’s the right price (i.e. free) if you want to get into animation but you can’t afford applications such as Flash or ToonBoom.
The tools that Pencil currently has within the application are (in my limited experience) the usual for an animation tool:
- Pencil Tool
- Paint Brush
- Pen Tool
- Polyline
- Eraser
- Clear Button
- Paint Bucket
- Colour Picker
- Select Tool
- Move Tool
- Move/Zoom Canvas
- Modify Curve
You can use the TimeLine tool to add layers such as a Bitmap Layer, Vector Layer, Sound Layer and Camera Layer. As it’s an animation application you can also add and remove KeyFrames.
You also have the option to use ‘onion skinning’, which lets you see a ghost image of both the previous and next frame so that you can trace what you drew to animate it. The default FPS is 12 but on the Time Line you can choose up to 50 FPS. You can decide whether to loop your animation so that you don’t have to keep pressing play over and over again.
Sound and image can also be imported into Pencil, from an audio application like Audacity, the Free Audio Editor and Recorder, or an image application like the Gimp or Photoshop.
Pencil will export your animation in either an Image Sequence, X-Sheet, Quicktime Movie or a Flash Movie. You can also import and export your Colour Palette, for ease of editing later – You will need it if you have any customised colours.
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