If you’re interested in creating content to promote your product or service, think about making a cartoon. Producing animation has several advantages over live video. You won’t need a physical set, a camera, or a crew. And there’s a variety of free and inexpensive animation tools that will help even beginners to create polished animations in a short timeframe.
Shifting Shapes. Can you name the 2D and 3D shapes? The game from ictgames has a draggable torch shining on a hidden shape. You can move the torch to guess the name of the shape and then click the 'eye' to see if you were right. Converts each frame of a mesh animation within a selected frame range to a Grease Pencil object keyframed strokes. The Bake Action tool computes the final animation of the selected objects with all those modifiers, drivers, and constraints applied, and keyframes the result. Start Frame, End Frame. Start/End frame for the baking process.
As an example, here’s an episode of a SpaceHospital, an animated web series that I co-created. The episode was produced in just a few days, building three-dimensional sets, animating two-dimensional characters, and then adding effects. No money was spent on production, allowing us to focus resources on our marketing efforts.
Here is a list of tools to create animated content. There are online and downloadable applications for animated presentations and ads, 2D vector-based and character animations, 3D studios for modeling and rendering, and more.
Animation Tools
Animaker is an animation platform with a variety of video styles and templates. Create 2D and layered animation, animated infographics, animated typography, and animated whiteboards. Choose a template, use props and backgrounds, upload your own images, and add effects and audio. Create video for YouTube, Facebook, and ads. Price: Free for videos up to 2 minutes. Paid plans start at $12 per month.
Animaker
Powtoon is a user-friendly and intuitive animation tool to create engaging videos. Use a storyboard builder, ready-made templates, and intuitive drag-and-drop features to create a high-quality Powtoon in no time. Price: Free plan with branding. Premium plans start at $19 per month.
Moovly. Make your own explainer video, advertising video, or conference presentation in less than 15 minutes. Choose a template or create your project from over 175 million video clips, animated objects, and sound files. Simply drag and drop elements into your template and add animation. Price: Plans start at $24.92 per month.
Vyond. Founded as GoAnimate in 2007, Vyond lets you create videos easily with a library of templates, sounds, props, and more. Grab a template and swap individual assets. Bring in your own images or music. Use your voice or a professional voice-over. Vyond features automatic character lip-syncing, advanced character and object animation, and video branding features. Price: Plans start at $39 per month.
Renderforest is a free online tool to create intros, animations, slideshows and music visualizations. Easily create logo animations, trailers, YouTube openings, explainer animations, slideshow videos, promotional videos and advertisements, and more. Access animation templates across all types and ranges, including character animations, educational cartoon videos, whiteboard animations, and animated stories. Price: Free for 3-minute videos. Paid plans start at $15 per month, or pay per export.
GIF Brewery is a handy tool to create animated GIF files by combining images, GIFs, and videos. Available for macOS. Price: $4.99.
Explee is an online tool to create animated whiteboard presentations. Access 6,000 images, animate any picture or add your own, apply a wide range of effects to boost your animated video, and apply animated transitions. Use the timeline to manage your animated elements. Edit audio and add sound effects, and even use the text-to-speech system to add narration. Price: Plans start at $7 per month.
VideoScribe is a user-friendly tool for creating hand-drawn, animated videos. Pictures and text are drawn out in sequence on a virtual whiteboard for a uniquely engaging visual effect. Add music from the library or import your own. Price: Plans start at $29 per month.
VideoScribe
Synfig Studio is free and open-source 2D animation software for creating film-quality animation using a vector and bitmap artwork. It eliminates the need to create animation frame by frame, allowing you to produce 2D animation of a higher quality with fewer people and resources. Available for Windows, Linux, and macOS X. Price: Free.
SketchUp is a tool for 3D modeling. Create objects, or start with elements from SketchUp’s huge library of free models. Price: Basic is free. Pro is $695.
Moho is a 2D animation studio with a rigging system to make the process easy. Add a skeleton to any image by pointing and clicking to create bones that overlay. Moho features advanced timelines and motion controls, drawing tools, audio tools, and automatic lip-syncing. Moho has many tools to get started, such as a character wizard, a follow path tool to direct characters and objects on pre-drawn paths, and a beginner’s mode with rollover tips and built-in tutorials. Price: $69.99. Professional version is $399.99.
Blender is the free and open source 3D creation suite that supports the entire 3D pipeline — modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, and even video editing and game creation. Sculpt characters, use simple keyframing or complex animation cycles, and render with sophisticated lighting and camera effects. Available for macOS, Windows, and Linux. Price: Free.
Adobe Character Animatorquickly animates 2D characters in real-time. Build your character from scratch in Illustrator or Photoshop, or start with one of the puppets already available. Using your webcam, track your own facial expressions and record in real-time. Movements can be saved as buttons, sliders, or knobs so they’re easier to remember than key commands. Smooth transitions between facial poses for a hand-animated look. Price: $20.99 per month. $52.99 per month as part of Adobe Creative Cloud.
Adobe Animate is a tool for interactive 2D vector animations. Create interactive web-based content using powerful illustration and animation tools. Sketch and draw more expressive characters with pressure- and tilt-sensitive vector brushes. Create interactive web banners that respond to user interactions such as mouse movement, touch, and clicks. Utilize advanced camera effects. Price: $20.99 per month. $52.99 per month as part of Adobe Creative Cloud.
Adobe After Effects creates motion graphics and visual effects. Set anything in motion using keyframes — including logos, shapes, and cartoons. After Effects has hundreds of effects to get just the look you want, from adding fog to changing colors to making it snow. Price: $20.99 per month. $52.99 per month as part of Adobe Creative Cloud.
Adobe After Effects
With SketchUp’s Solid tools, you can create new shapes by combining or cutting one shape with another, making it easy to model an outer shell or joinery.
In SketchUp, a solid is any 3D model (component or group) that has a finite closed volume. A SketchUp solid cannot have any leaks (missing faces or faces that do not meet at an edge). The following image contains several solids.
Check out the following table for a quick introduction to the Solid Tools, including what the tool does and whether it’s available in SketchUp Free.
| Tool | Name | What It Does | Included in SketchUp Free? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Outer Shell | Leaves only the outer faces of overlapping solids. | Yes | |
| Union | Combines two or more solids into a single form. | Paid subscriptions only | |
| Subtract | One solid removes part of another and is deleted. | Paid subscriptions only. In SketchUp Free, use Intersect with Model. | |
| Trim | One solid trims another but remains in the model. | Paid subscriptions only | |
| Intersect | Leaves only the intersecting geometry. | Paid subscriptions only | |
| Split | Splits solids along intersecting geometry. | Paid subscriptions only |
To find the Solid Tools, look in the following parts of the SketchUp interface:
- Solids toolbar
- Tools menu (Select Tools > Outer Shell or Select Tools > Solid Tools and select the other tools from a submenu)
- Tool palette (macOS)
- Solids toolbar in the left-hand tray
- Solid Inspector utility in the right-hand panel
In the following video, you see examples of the Solid tools in action. In the following sections of this article, you will find steps and details about using each tool. (Note, however, that you can't place SketchUp models in Google Earth anymore.)
Table of Contents
- Reversed faces: Solid Inspector is also a handy utility for making sure that face normals are facing outwards.
- Stray edges: Surplus edge geometry that does not define any face.
- Internal and external faces: Stray geometry on the inside or outside of your model.
- Face Holes: A hole in an exterior face. Easy fix for Solid Inspector.
3d Animation Applications
Manually Fixable Errors
Some errors cannot be automatically fixed by Solid Inspector, and must be manually repaired using SketchUp’s drawing (or Eraser) tools. After fixing a few manual errors, it’s a good idea to re-run the Inspector to see if your changes have cleaned up the model enough for automatic fixing to take over. Manually fixable errors include:
- Border holes: These holes share at least one edge with the surface of a solid. These errors can be manually fixed by drawing over or erasing the highlighted geometry. As you go, try re-running the inspector to see if you’ve done enough repair go for Solid Inspector to automatically fix the rest of the model.
- Nested groups/components: Nested objects in groups or components can lead to confusing STL exports for 3D printers. Solid Inspector won’t fix these manually, but you can use the Inspector to look at each nested instance and decide whether to delete it or explode the geometry into your model.
- Image entities: Images imported into SketchUp can’t be exported to an STL file and also inhibit Solid Tool operations. Solid Inspector will prompt you about these errors, but you’ll need to delete them manually. Consider making Image entities into components. They are easy to temporarily delete from your model in this respect. Also, painting a face with an image texture doesn’t impact Solid-ness.
- Short edges: Very small geometry can cause problems in 3D prints or solid operations. Since these problems are unpredictable -- and short edges do not disqualify objects as solid in SketchUp -- Solid Inspector will not fix these errors automatically. However, Solid Inspector is a great way to find and evaluate these problem areas.
Best 3d Animation Tools
Show Errors
Free Video Animation Tools
When you have multiple errors that cannot be fixed automatically, it’s useful to use the “Show Errors” command to navigate between individual problems that you’ll need to manually fix. Use the left and right arrows to cycle through all the errors of a certain type that Solid Inspector has identified; the SketchUp camera will zoom to the problem area.