FREE SOFTWARES

PENCIL

Just stumbled across this software called 'Pencil'.. Not seeing it being any better than flash/toonboom or anything but its small and probly worth trying it out...(gonna try it out now XD).Works in both bitmap/raster and vector so should be good or at least decent. It is free and open to download.

Well, tried it now and its pretty basic and stuff but still worth a messabout  I guess when bored and for absolute amatuers that don't really want to get into animation but would like to have something there to be able to animate now and then.

PENCIL HOMPAGE (http://www.pencil-animation.org/)

For windows XP/ Vista/7
Download Here. (http://sourceforge.net/projects/pencil-planner/files/Pencil/0.4.4beta/pencil-0.4.4b-win.zip/download)

For Mac/Linux
Download Here. (http://www.pencil-animation.org/index.php?id=Download)
                                                                                                                                     

UNITY 3D ENGINE

A 3D animation software but more for games. There is a free version to downlaod aswel which obviously doesnt offer the features that Unity Pro offers but its free! 

Was told about this by Mark (a friend at university)

Depending what you want to get into but it seems really good so far, haven't used it yet but will soon.


Unity Spring 2010 Highlight Reel from Unity3D on Vimeo.

UNITY.COM (http://unity3d.com/)

Unity 3.1 Free Version (http://unity3d.com/unity/download/)

Specs - Pro/Free

                                                                                                                                      

KTOON

Another free software but this is only for Linux so I can't really check to see how it is but it looks OK from some footage and images I've seen. That's all I'm basing it on though so I really don't know.

Homepage (http://www.ktoon.net/portal/)

                                                                                                                                     

CREATOON

This other free piece of software seems to be better for for scenery and tweening more that animating characters and such. But might aswel just use Flash as this doesn't offer much.

I did find this animating on youtube which has some nice scenery animations/tweening 

Thats all I got as I'm not too interesting in this since Flash could get me the same efects.

Homepage (http://www.creatoon.com/index.php)

Download (http://www.creatoon.com/download.php)

Just follow the instructions given from on the homepage (so I'm guessing that it is ligit) which are:
"You can now download the full version of CreaToon 3.0.
After installing CreaToon, first run it once, which will produce a message box saying you need to unlock it.
To unlock CreaToon, also download unlock.zip, unzip this file and run unlock.exe. It will say that CreaToon is now unlocked. You will now be able to run CreaToon."