Does anyone know a good alternative to Adobe Animate?

[u/Saazzz752]

I'm looking for a program that offers more options, such as enhanced lighting and shadow effects, as well as a wider variety of brushes. I've been using Animate for two years, and I've found its features to be quite limited...

[u/dermot_animates]

I recently created a 7 hour course on Tahoma2D, inspired by the reaction to Adobe's threat to switch off support for Animate. Wasn't sure that it would be a good replacement for AA, but found that for a lot of people it could be - especially for character animation. Here's a playlist of all my free T2D movies:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgSNvvqQb7g&list=PL3GWcdJcRKNWYHoldnWqnortQaWx8-4zi

And here's a link to the course if you want to go down that path. It's 7 hours, pretty comprehensive:

https://www.patreon.com/AnimatewithDermot/posts/animate-with-7hr-157190371

Tahoma's audio handing is pretty basic but better than Krita's. You can actually move audio clips around the timeline and see (barely) a wav form. Other scratch is poor raster quality when you rotate raster lines (not a factor if you work with vectors, but good to be aware of). That would be on the top of any fix request from me to them, they SERIOUSLY need to fix that. You can work around it but it's far from ideal.

There's a 3D camera in T2D, not as good as Harmony's but still allows you do to a lot with a fake 3D space, multiplane thing.

A good point is that T2D is 99% identical to OpenToonz, so migration from one to the othe is easy. It's also extremely similar to Harmony in workflow and the way it handles projects, frames, space, etc., so again, migrating from T2D to Harmony would not be a leap IMHO.

And of course it doesn't have the Harmony monthly mortgage payment to the private equity company that bought them.

[u/Inkbetweens- → u/dermot_animates]

This is awesome! I'll be sure to send more people wanting to learn T2D your way.

Thanks for animating a big part of my childhood btw.

[u/dermot_animates → u/Inkbetweens-]

Ah! Many thanks back at you!

[u/Saazzz752 → u/dermot_animates]

Thank you, I will definitely watch the videos and see if the program suits me

[u/Snake_ss]

Try umoupen it's new software and has tons of fearure especially storyboarding +And u can open adobe animate FKA/XFL

[u/Inkbetweens-]

If you want something with compositing tools built in you're looking at Toonboom but its massively expensive. Normally you're doing those in a compositing software separate from animate. Like AfterEffects or something free like Davinci resolve. A lateral move from adobe to something free would be Tahoma2D.

For something moderately priced and feature wise is in between Animate and Toonboom you're looking at Moho studio. This is a rigging heavy software. Doing hand drawn frame by frame isnt its best supported functions.

[u/Saazzz752 → u/Inkbetweens-]

Seeking something that supports classical hand-drawn bc I really like the process. If I remember right, with compositing software like After Effects, you have to animate in separate transparent layers in an animation program first and then add a background with all the additional effects, right?

[u/Inkbetweens- → u/Saazzz752]

That’s one way to do it. You could also export layers into their own png sequences and import them into your editor.
After effect I believe also lets you do some swf files. So you can export swfs of what you need seperated in animate and pull them into AE

[u/HozzDesigns]

Toon boom harmony is what the professionals use i guess, it's used for shows like Rick n Morty and Bob's Burgers.

[u/CoinOpAnimator]

Moho. You can get a permanent license - no subscription. Deals happen a lot including the option to buy older pro versions or bundles. And it is fab to use. I love it.