In other words, things that you wouldn't recommend to new animators

Pencil2D is quite bad, but it's free so I can't really muster up that much hatred towards it

Yeah I’ve used it before and I thought it was alright

"Vectorian Giotto" its Very unstable, crashes every 5 Seconds, doesn't have Option to Export the result as .MP4 and has a broken interface....this makes Sense because the software was abandoned in 2010.

sounds kinda like flash but worse

i had to use tupitube for a semester (school) and oh my god its so bad....but its free so. Whatever.

im going to be in the minority here but Adobe Animate/ Flash.

Buggy unstable trash for what Adobe is demanding for the right to use it.

Same here, I know flash gets a lot of love here on new grounds but I seriously thought I was going to be the only odd one out. I've lost weeks worth of work using that junk .. never animating on flash again

I fucking hate animating with Adobe After Effects, I had to go through a course using that shit, that software ain't made for good old animation. It can look good but you need a good PC for that shit, which I don't have, and I had to pray every 10 minutes for the damn software to not stop working.

The weird Adobe Fresco animation tool, don't know why they added it to a primarily painting and sketching software. Maybe for gif making?, but at that point just use any other software for gifs.

I personally use fresco it cause its the software I know and I like the brushes.

goanimate or vyond if you're an annoying person

i feel that

adobe animate (not to be mistaken with flash)

id honeslty rather animate with a pen and paper

Powerpoint, my old CMM teacher had a old powerpoint animation from the 90s with a thousand slides showing how a mill and lathe works.

Flash gets a lot of love because of what it did at the time that hadn't been done by others. It was the jack-of-all-trades but that also meant that it was inferior to something specialized for the task. No such specialized tool was able to achieve the market penetration that flash had, or if it did, was not as easy to work with -- and that's why people loved it.

When it came to making games, there weren't many alternatives in the beginning. You probably had Java applets at best, and even those got killed off fairly early on. Then you had stuff like Virtools, Adobe Director, and Microsoft Silverlight but all of them were too clunky or obscure to use, and they were rather uncommon in their own right.

Not sure about animation, but I don't think other software out there were as easy to use as flash. It helped that Flash was so goddamn easy to pirate compared to the rest, generated SWF files that were very small compared to MP4s, and that other tools that were as usable as Flash couldn't export SWF files, that helped cement Flash's position at least on Newgrounds (until it started supporting MP4 uploads).

And even back then, people had a love-hate relationship with it; almost everyone who has worked with it for an extended period of time has had their work lost at some point or the other. I've had entire projects straight up scrapped because a save file got corrupted here and there. But there was no alternative but to grit your teeth and bear it. Flash is still easy to use these days, but nostalgia aside, that's probably all it's got going for it -- there's a lot more options available on the table, but inertia's a tough bitch to overcome.

yeah im aware of that, the bitey series i thinks called and even chuck jones proved you can animate in flash. so i defenitly understand why, its just the now in time.

toon boom can convert your flash files, even can change the whole program to be flash and every hot key to.

even in game built functions to use, (never used them fully) but still basically saying everything flash can do toon boom dose better, and easier. only diff is instead of a tween its called a peg, and learning how to use pegs takes like 4 mins.

Only thing i think people can argue why use flash is if for certian game designs using the built in function. besides that, why bother? just go toon boom i say, it works, can customize to be flash, and it NEVER CRASHES LOL. and if did, it has a built in recovery system for restoring a point. i think out of 8 years using it i had one crash and it was my fault anyways.

I think most people would agree with you much more because of the 'adobe' part rather than the 'flash' part. Obviously Flash has a legacy to it, but it's just as common for people to complain about it and it seems the consensus is the absorption of it by Adobe is where that downfall began.

I mean, I've made this point before, but while I'll take Clip Studio over it any day of the week, the fact remains my old MACROMEDIA ERA Flash program has a more robust and animator-friendly onion skinning setup than CSP does right now!

gimp , seriously why i can understand this

As stated before, Never ever touch 'Pencil 2D', I spent almost 3 months on my first animation project where I could have spent 15 days on it because I had to draw every single frame, especially still frames because of how unoptimized it was and also the vector tools did not work what so ever...

It's Open source photoshop, that's why you don't understand it, you have to have the mind of a linux user to understand it.

fair enough :3

Probably Mario Paint. The most frames you can draw for an animation is 9 if I remember correctly.

Free gif making websites. At least, the ones I’ve used were all really bare-bones and had bad web design.

Probably the countless animation apps I've dabbled with on mobile app stores (App Store for iOS, Google Play for Android). There's a ton of genuinely-fantastic apps that are genuinely worth the price, and in many cases only ask you to pay ONCE, like Nomad Sculpt and ToonSquid (basically Flash but only the good parts of that software), but like so many other online stores, there is also a bunch of useless and unusable shovelware if you ever dare to venture beyond the already-famous and top-selling apps I just mentioned. Besides that, I wouldn't recommend illustration apps like ProCreate or IbisPaintX that also happen to have some very basic frame-by-frame animation tools for anything more serious than a silly GIF shitpost--somehow, they always seem to be missing basic features even for proper frame-by-frame 2D animation, like a background layer or even the ability to use separate layers at all in some cases, and of course they are often laggy compared to specialized animation apps and software.

On the PC side of things, I haven't had much luck with FOSS software. Krita is probably the best free option just from a familiar 2D workflow standpoint, but because it's (mostly) raster-based instead of vector-based, you need to work with some very tiny, Standard-Definition canvasses to avoid serious lag. It's impressive that Blender is even capable these days of 2D animation at all in addition to 3D software, but unfortunately the 2D animation UI is so needlessly complicated that I certainly wouldn't recommend it for beginners or people working on a deadline in general. Apparently, some of Across the Spider-verse's special effects used Blender's 2D tools, so it's still probably at least worth looking into to add some stylistic 2D flair on top of your 3D renders.

Blender is the GOAT for affordable 3D animation, though, and unless your computer is as powerful as the ones Disney uses for their pointless photorealistic remakes, AND connected to render farms that eat up 225% of California's carbon budget for the year, "industry-standard" software like Maya and Renderman might be too bloated to run well on your "pleb" laptop, compared to super-efficient and indie-friendly Blender. I guess 3D software to avoid is no-longer-relevant stuff like Lightwave and MODO that are too expensive for indies and hobbyists, unlike Blender and its forks, yet at the same time doesn't do anything that current industry standards like Maya don't do a million times better and faster. On mobile, unless we have some revolutionary new battery and chip technology in the near future, I would also be wary of apps that claim that you can rig, animate and even render just on your phone. We are lucky right now just to have apps that let us make extremely low-poly base meshes on our mobile devices (including the otherwise-powerful and expensive iPad Pro) to later transfer onto our PCs and Blender.

Personally, as an animation software, kritas alright but not GOOD. It fucking explodes and dies once you give it over 50 frames, and tweeting in it SUCKS.

IMO it is really fantastic, but only for drawn frame by frame animation. It's a bit of a one trick pony. If you're gonna do something that requires scaled vector drawings, complex motion tweens or rigged cutout/puppet animation, then I'd say Krita can't really cut it to be honest.

In addition to that, Krita isn't very suitable for using it as your sole piece of software to make a full fledged animated short in. My workflow involves making tiny bits of animation, scene by scene, layer by layer, and then, using some auxiliary editing tool, like Vegas, putting everything together. If I were to make an animation using ONLY Krita, it would simply be impossible for me.

every animator uses it including ME

Yeah, I get what ur sayin. Krita is good but extremely limited in what it can do. If you wanna do rigs, tweening, or anything that has more than 50-100 frames, ur kinda outta luck. It’s good in frame by frame, but it’s kinda mediocre at best animation software-wise.

SourceFilmmaker has to be the buggyist and broken animating I have ever used.

I agree. Tho, I'd have to admit, that the stuff at which Krita is good, it's really damn good. After I got comfortable with working with its 2D frame-by-frame animation features, I can't go back to doing that in Flash. :)