Oh boy! Let's hear what Farfenwaffle has to say about free animation programs! If you have any that I missed. Kindly say what it is and give me a link to the program. I will then upload the mentioned program to my news post!

Let's start off with this, Flash generally surpasses all free animation programs. If you have the money check out the adobe site. About 700$ for the full version, and If you look hard enough you can find the student version for around 200$. You can even try flash out for free! Just press "try" on the flash page.

Now that we have that out of the way let's hear some ANIMATION SOFTWARES!
EZ toon
-Download-
Finding that download like was like a wild goose chase! If anyone knows an official ez toon website please link me in the comments ;)
heres the newgrounds thread
This program is 100% frame-by-frame kinda stuff. It has onion skin (Although only one layer of it) It is only in black and white but it has the ability to color in with shades. It exports in animatedGIF
Pencil Animation Software
-download link-
-homepage-

A very nice program, It is vector based like flash it also has bitmap layers and has a very nice timeline. It supports sound also. While not as advanced as flash it still has a variety of tools. It also supports colors
Pivot Stick Figure Animator
-download 2.2.5-
-dowload 3.0-
Again, still no sign of a homepage of any sort.
newgrounds thread

This program is really great if you want to make a stick movie with little to no redrawing. It has a pretty good timeline and supports colors. Very simple animation program for beginners in animation. It is still suitable for vets too.

Helium Frog (stop motion)
-homepage-
-download-

While this is a stop motion animator, it is the best free one I have seen! It features simple chroma keying, a nice frame viewer( stuff like that is rare in stop motion programs), nice look, and tons of other stuff. I recomend this if you have a camera that hooks to your computer, or a webcam.

LiveSwif
-Forum-
-download-

From what I remember, liveswif is an swf producing program. It is alot like flash in it's looks. Everything is alot like flash except the timeline is so so. At times the program can be hard for beginners. I recomend downloading it if you want to feel like your using flash.
Blender (3d animation)
-download-
-homepage-

A powerful 3d animator if you want to go throguh the trouble of learning it. It supports everything you would want in a 3d animation and model creator. Although The interface is really crazy. If you have some 3d experience already it would help.

Now no one will have to dirty this brand new awesome forum with "how are you get flash?!" Even though this is animation in general. This should help you get started if you don't have flash.

Thats a great list.

Im not sure if you are only listing free software. but I figured this is cheap enough to mention

FlipBoom by toonboom. is only 40 bux and it exports to swf.

I remember when I still had wild and crazy dreams of becoming an animator, I used FlipBoom. Good times. It really is good software though.

Great post and great list Farfen! A topic like this has been needed for quite some time.

There is another program that I would recommend everyone to stay away from. It's called MOHO.
It says that it can export to flash, but its VERY poor.
It basically can only animate images in flash, which is pretty bad, also when an image is zoomed in, its not pixels, its just blurry.
Its only $100 but stay away from it, its a lie.

Its more or less for videos

don't forget that if your a student, flash CS4 is only a 100 euro's, so its pretty affordable

If your into 3d and want a more advanced environment, I would also check out 3D MAX. This isnt free and costs 4 times as much as flash but it is worth mentioning.

3D Max Website Link

At 1/26/10 09:58 PM, DrClay wrote: There is another program that I would recommend everyone to stay away from. It's called MOHO.
It says that it can export to flash, but its VERY poor.
It basically can only animate images in flash, which is pretty bad, also when an image is zoomed in, its not pixels, its just blurry.
Its only $100 but stay away from it, its a lie.

Its more or less for videos

MOHO, or anime studios 5 as its called now is awesome.
You can get it around 40 bucks now, and it is not bad at all.
You just have to learn it.

It is a bone rigging system, something seen in 3D, If you know how to do it it is very powerful and useful.
If you don't know how to rigg or used to inverse kinematics, you will hate it.
and of course its for movies, what else would it be for? lol

here is a
Anim8or
Free 3D based program

pencil animation is one to check out.
easy to use, one of my favs, I particularly like how you can save it, it makes a folder with all your frames in it.

At 2/2/10 02:07 PM, BillysProgrammer wrote: If your into 3d and want a more advanced environment, I would also check out 3D MAX. This isnt free and costs 4 times as much as flash but it is worth mentioning.

3D Max Website Link

student version = free 1 year trial, then you can download a 1 year trial of the next version and so on
:p

At 2/3/10 01:43 AM, Ani-x wrote:

At 1/26/10 09:58 PM, DrClay wrote: There is another program that I would recommend everyone to stay away from. It's called MOHO.
It says that it can export to flash, but its VERY poor.
It basically can only animate images in flash, which is pretty bad, also when an image is zoomed in, its not pixels, its just blurry.
Its only $100 but stay away from it, its a lie.

Its more or less for videos

MOHO, or anime studios 5 as its called now is awesome.
You can get it around 40 bucks now, and it is not bad at all.
You just have to learn it.

I was always wary of moho, I really want to get toon boom though. MOHO gets alot of bad talk and I really don't have $40 on me. Maybe when I am stinking rich from becoming the worlds best animator I will try it out.

At 2/2/10 09:46 PM, PrinceFlea wrote: The Pencil animation seems pretty interesting but I can't seem to get the noise layer to play any Audio even after I imported in there is a way to make it work?

Yeah...I have never used the sound layer. I only used the vector and bitmap layer. Sorry, I thin kthey have a forum though

At 2/2/10 02:35 PM, HDXmike wrote: I am dissapoint , actually i like this but im really hurt that you didnt add this beastly cool / lightweight mofo

its so easy to pickup , fast to boot and feels so nice and classic , it also like using photo shop because the brush strokes support pressure for alpha and size

That looks pretty nice! I should really try it out. Nice find

Cheap, efficient Flash programs, you say?

Don't forget about the good ol' Sothink SWF Quicker. It has pretty much everything Flash 8 has.

Back before I bought Flash this is what I used - the only downside was that it didn't have a brush tool (which is why I ended up never using outlines) but it was still efficient. I haven't checked in recently but I believe that they have updated it with just about every tool you'd ever need and more.

It's about $80 bucks now, but it's worth it if you want all the goodies that Flash has.

This should be stickied. :p

At 2/6/10 07:17 AM, notwasimthatsforsure wrote: hey stup0d just use the trial of flash andf fuckin find the serial N0b

Wow really?! golly gee! I think that kind of stuff is just a big FU in adobes face though. If You have enough morals you can save up $200-$800. I must admit it is kinda steep to pay. It's fine with me if you want to get tracked down by the FBI or whatever.

the authorities have been contacted, leave this post immediately

Also, I could someone leave a review post in more or less the format I was using to review those programs that cost money? I don't have them so it would not work for me to review them :(

I always link people to this blogpost when they ask this question on the Wi/Ht?, it has 22 programs on the list, and the majority of them work as alternatives to Flash, the others being progams that can either easily export to Flash or can be used in conjunction with it, as an alternative to programs like After Effects. Some programs are free, while some are just very cheap and I find that it can be extremely useful to users who want to get started in Flash.

Anyways, helpful list. This will be useful for linking to people to as well.

At 2/6/10 07:17 AM, notwasimthatsforsure wrote: hey stup0d just use the trial of flash andf fuckin find the serial N0b

well, I did this too, I feel quite bad for it but Im gonna buy it in a couple of months anyway (student edition) so it doesn't do any harm.

I can't stress enough that none of these (except blender, that's 3D, not 2D animation, it's different :p) can even compare to Flash.
There is a reason why Flash is so widely used and so expensive.
Because it's the best animation program out there. Period.

If you get anything else, you are only settling for less.

Do what it takes to buy Flash.
It's FAR cheaper to get the student version. Get that.

At 3/4/10 01:54 AM, Celtic-Tiger wrote: Because it's the best animation program out there. Period.

No it is not. It is a quality digital 2D animation program, and a good choice for the web animator who can afford it. For professional animation, ToonBoom has been chosen by many credible companies.

This topic is for those who can't afford Flash. Maybe they will be able to later, but right now they don't have the money to spend. These alternatives are great tools, but that's all any program is, a tool. Animators are not limited by tools.

I tryed doin the pencil but it no work. It says does not appear to be valid flash.

Well, none of these programs look promising besides the fact that I've used Pivot Stickfigure Animator and it was pretty good, although I'm not very experienced with using that program, not good at my easing, but I usually have the good ideas for a small animation, but never cease to make it happen, at least once. Anyway, I still prefer Flash or at least the Macromedia Flash 8 version, I'm used to using them and it would be hard adjusting to another one, instead of Flash, which I'll probably always be better at using. But, I can't afford it on top of Apartment Bills and crap. I'm never going to be able to release a flash animation to Newgrounds, unless I can ever get Flash. Oh, and I know this was like a speech, I like making my posts longer, I like using at least 1,000 of the characters I can actually use on a post or a new thread. Anyway, I still want Flash, but I could work with Pivot, if it had a Flash Exporter or Swf Exporter and whatnot. So, if you read this entire thing, thanks for listening (reading) what I have to say about my issue, and how I want to solve it, but I really can't solve this problem unless I buy the Product of Flash, which will never happen for me.

Has anybody tried Synfig yet?

http://synfig.org/

"Synfig is a powerful, industrial-strength vector-based open-source 2D animation software package, designed from the ground-up for producing feature-film quality animation with fewer people and resources. While there are many other programs currently on the market to aid with the efficient production of 2D animation, we are currently unaware of any other software that can do what our software can. "

Unfortunately I've never been able to get Synfig to work. The best animation program I've found has been ToonBoom. If you don't wanna spend any money try Pencil or Plastic Animation Paper, but you get what you pay for.

Help I fell down and I can't get back up.

There's also Doink.com, but that sucks. A lot. Unless you're planning on doing an unproffesional short animation with no sound.

pencil is actually really great .. i did my potato man series with it
checks out my userpage to see what it can do
( i sorta suck a bit so theres more posibilities with pencil .. i use bitmap layers instead of vector aswell )

2 drawbacks with pencil and oly 2 i can find
the fill ( paint bucket ) tool it awkward .. as it dosent use the laayoer your on .. but the layer behind ... you can get used to it though ( hence none of my flashed having sound )

the sound does NOT work when exporting to .swf .. that caused me many an hours stress

however if you can find a converter you can export as something else and convert the file to .swf and the audio may work then

At 1/26/10 09:40 PM, AlexOrSomthing wrote: I remember when I still had wild and crazy dreams of becoming an animator, I used FlipBoom. Good times. It really is good software though.

flipboom creations can be uploaded to newgrounds?

At 2/2/10 02:07 PM, BillysProgrammer wrote: If your into 3d and want a more advanced environment, I would also check out 3D MAX. This isnt free and costs 4 times as much as flash but it is worth mentioning.

3D Max Website Link

The problem with MAX is it is inferior to maya in terms of animation. modelling and environment max is the better by far. ie maya has 5-10 tools for modelling. max has 25-50 if i remember right

sorry chap but you're only allowed to talk about legit manners of acquiring software.

cool, i am trying the adobe flash cs5 trial, i cant find a student version of it though, is it called the student/teacher version now? its like 400 bucks wow

Does the Flash Portal accept Pivot animations?

Try googling swfquicker

I remember pencil I use to hate how it always crashed on me, but oh my gawd, It can do so many many things if you look on the forums