Where to start and how to animate for free or on a low budget:
Animation can be a daunting task. It is hard to learn how to animate even with the right equipment. In this guide we are gonna answer some of the more basic questions in how you should start learning how to animate.
Where to start?
The truth is that there are plenty of options to animate in both for 2D and 3D animation. There is no rule that it must be digital or drawn to put it up online either. A lot of people conflate drawing and animating. For many forms of animation you need to draw, or at least its a valuable skill. That is not the only way to animate however. There are many ways to animate to tell stories that are still relevant today that don’t mean you have to draw.
If you want to tell stories online there is no need to necessarily become proficient in high quality animation. Don’t get me wrong, its always great to be good at animating but if the only thing you want to do is small skits to put on youtube you might just want to make comics that you dub over.
People like Goobsmooch, Mummy Joe, and Danny Holt has a all gathered a considerable following by mainly telling stories with slides rather then full on animations. It’s also worth noting that both Goobsmooch and Holt mainly use black and white pen and paper to tell their stories. You don’t have to be proficient in digital art to make something and put it online or even just keep to yourself. A thing that is great with these sorts of small animations is that you can use them as a chance to try to get a better feeling for timing and the writing part of animation.
When you ask “how to animate” you implicitly ask a lot of things. If you just want to be good at animating fluid motion then that’s okay, Richard Williams unfinished “masterpiece” The Thief and The Cobbler isn’t beloved because of its writing, its because of its imaginative and fluid animation. If you want to whisk people away to worlds of your creation then absolutely learn to animate, but sometimes the effort might not be worth the results, there are animated versions of Goobsmooch‘s videos and although I like them a lot they don’t substantially ad anything that isn’t already in the original videos.
You don’t need to be too original. You don’t have to make new character designs for fan projects and you don’t have to make your own 3d models. A lot of people make Lego stop motion and that’s completely okay. Animators like Pantsahat started of making Lego animations and he still uses premade figures to make shorts today. It’s okay to work with what you have available.
If you cant afford a good computer its okay to photo your drawings with your phone and dub them. You can make makeshift flipbooks to learn how to animate if you really can’t do it digitally.
Where can I learn how to animate?
There is a pretty straight forward answer in learning how to animate. The first thing to do is to test a lot of different things. You can’t expect to get skilled without practicing, it’s just not happening. You might have a better understanding of what to do if you have read the relevant literature but its better to practice the theory you are learning.
The main text you should be learning from is generally The Animators Survival Kit by Richard Williams. Almost all advice you will hear about the fundamentals of animation will be derived from this book and it exist in its whole as a guide that helps you through the basics of animations. Although you definitely can buy it that isn’t a necessity. The whole book exists for free in the Internet Archives and their are plenty of video versions you can find online when you learn how to animate.
Other knowledge that might be more software specific can without a doubt be found online.
Animation and drawing are not the same thing but learning how to draw might be very helpful when animating. A place you can go to learn the fundamentals in drawing is Draw A Box. It’s a free online course in drawing that covers all of the basics.
What software you should use:
There are plenty of options to start animating digitally since their are plenty of different ways to animate as a whole. There are frame by frame, puppet animation, pixel animation, rotoscoping, 3D animation, motion capture, and many other ways to animate.
In this guide we will mostly focus on 2D and 3D in general and not focus on a specific way to animate. The recommendations given are mostly given from the perspective of someone who wants to work independently on a small to nonexistent budget. Other software might be considered industry standard but in reality are very expensive with expensive subscriptions or high fees.
I am gonna try to keep this as free as possible. Keep in mind, as we are disusing digital art your personal computer may or may not be fitting for all the programs. Having a pen tablet for your pc can be critical or highly in some ways when making art and there is no way of getting that for free. Given that most software is free you should feel free to try them despite your computer of choice.
How to animate in 2D?
2D animation might be the first thing we think about when discussing animation. A vast amount of animation from way before Steamboat Willy to a lot of modern animation are made in 2D. That means that it consists of drawings on a flat plane. Here we are gonna focus on software made to animate in frame by frame and not puppet animation.
The first tool that I recommend you trying when it comes to learning how to animate is Blender. Blender is a 3D and 2D animation software that is used at large today. Although most focus on the software’s 3D capabilities you can also do 2D animations in it through the blender grease pencil. By choosing 2D animation while creating a new object you can draw directly on the canvas and record different keyframes.
What is great with Blender is that it also opens the door to naturally incorporate 3D models in your 2D animations and the other way around. Here is a tutorial by the animator Ian “Worthikids” Worthington who is most known for his webbshow Bigtop Burger that blends Blender 3D and 2D to create a 2D esque esthetic. The tutorial is a slightly outdated as some things have slightly changed but mostly as it comes to UI and not in function.
I’m personally not an animator, I’m a hobbyist with a love for animation and story telling, but I’d like to show a short little work in progress animation I made in grease pencil in a few hours just to show that isn’t impossible to make something even if it isn’t perfect. This is incredibly rough and not close to being finished. But most things you make will probably be incredibly tough when you learn how to animate.
You can download blender either via their website or on steam where it automatically gets updated.
The biggest issue with blender to me is that you might need a semi powerful pc to use it. It runs just fine on my stationary but on my old laptop it barely works, just so you keep that in mind if you encounter lag or any other issue.
There are however many other options as well like Opentoonz, which is a complete, open source animation program which has been used and co developed by the big name studio Ghibli and has been used since in a majority of Ghibli’s movies.
There is also Synfig that focuses more on puppet animation. Puppet animation is rather normal in todays professional environment with many animated series.
Pencil2D is an open source animation software mostly focusing on simple frame by frame animation.
You can also technically animate in Krita and Firealpaca although they first and foremost are drawing software.
All the software I bring up here are open source, partially because they are free and useful, but also because their is a value to open source software. Earlier this February, Adobe announced that they’d be closing down Adobe animate. They shortly after revoked the cancellation due to public backlash.
Although it didn’t happen I’d like for you to imagine the horror of someone who professionally has worked with Adobe animate for many years to potentially lose their job and that all their experience with that software would go to waste because a company didn’t feel like supporting it.
Personally I don’t want that to be me. That’s why open source alternatives are generally better in that regard cause as long as there are interest in it they will keep getting updated by the community and they are free as well. That’s why it can be good to use a future proof alternative when you learn how to animate.
How to animate in 3D?
When you learn how to animate in 3d there is really only two separate options that can be used for free.
The first one is the previously discussed Blender which is mainly a 3d animation and modeling software. Blender is filled to the brim with different functions that can help your animation but its also rather daunting to start with it when you learn how to animate in the software. There are many different things to learn and it’s not as obvious as pen to paper is.
If you just want to learn how to animate it might be good to start of using other already rigged models to do so and focus on the characters and the camera. It is however a very good skill to be able to make your own assets. To me the hardest part of 3d animation and rendering is probably learning how shaders work.
The easiest way to grasp Blender and learn how to animate with it is to do the famous Blender Donut Tutorial made by blender guru which is a tutorial which aims to teach you the basics of the software while making a donut. Any other knowledge you might need to learn how to animate can be found either in blenders own documentation or within the community. A part that is amazing with Blender is just how large the community is and they can and will help you either by asking questions you have before you or by answering questions you ask.
A blender project we have discussed on this website is Slumlordz.
Another free option, that sadly isn’t open source, is the Source Film Maker. SFM and S2FM are 3D animation tools produced by Valve which you receive when downloading Valve’s games. these games are free like TF2 and Dota2. Many animators has amassed huge success within the SFM sphere that translates to hundreds of thousands of subscribers on YouTube.
SFM is however a lot more interested in how to animate rather then how to model and make assets, to my knowledge there is also not to many options when it comes to shaders as it renders it in the same engine that TF2 would render its graphics. The original SFM is rather outdated although there still is a large audience for movies made in it. On this website we’ve as of now spoken about the sfm animator Tipsy Duck which you can read here.
There are many tools to start modeling in 3d though like Blockbench which is mostly meant for Minecraft models but can be imported to other game engines and animation software.
Here is a little cowboy I made in Blockbench.
What about AI?
No. That is not a way to learn how to animate at all.
Joel haver, a YouTube animator, hardly works in frame by frame but instead uses the tool EbSynth which is more or less a software that automatically rotoscopes a video onto whatever you draw on it. As opposed to generative AI this don’t steal art from other creatives or aim to singlehandedly remove creative jobs from existence. Using this will not teach you how to animate per se but it is a way to speed up the rotoscoping process in a way that don’t remove humans from it. Its more akin to a filter then gen AI which this website doesn’t condone.
Summary
There are plenty of tools to start learning how to animate and the most important part is to actually start. Many skills are transferable to an extent but its valuable to consider what you are gonna learn if you are considering doing this in the future as all software isn’t gonna be around, or competitive, forever.
The most important part is that you try to use your creativity in the way that matters to you to tell the express yourself in the ways you want and tell the stories you want to tell.
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