This is TJ. In this video, I'm going to quickly be showing you five free programs that you can download and use for creating 2D animations on your computer. These programs are Sinfig, Blender, Pencil, 2P and Gimp. All these programs are open source, completely free to download and use. And you can find more information here on my channel on YouTube, TJFree, or at my website, TJFree.com. This first one we'll look at Sinfig is a very great tool. Here's the interface for it. It's a pretty advanced animation program. I would recommend you have some experience doing animation on a computer before using this. Just know it's going to have a steep learning curve. Here we're seeing a feature that has where you can map like a skeleton or use a bone tool to map out a character or certain object so that they move together with each other. Then here we're going to see mapping it to this sketch or this drawing of these feet dancing or not sure what they're doing. This is not my work by the way. All the examples you're going to see of these software. I've taken from Creative Commons sources here on YouTube. I appreciate the artists for creating this work and for publishing it with a Creative Commons license. You can view the sources for this work in the comments of this video. Hopefully this gives you a feel for what Sinfig Studio looks like and what it can do. It works on Windows, Mac, and Taj, and Linux. It's a very, very full-featured and definitely one you want to check out. This next one we'll look at Blender is actually a 3D animation program. I pull up the interface here. It's 3D but you can work if you just work in a single plane then it becomes, you can work in 2D. That's what we're seeing here. Here's an animation character that was drawn up. I believe using the program Inkscape and then it was imported into Blender. You can see the bone tool has been used here to create a skeleton that the character is then mapped to. When you move the hand, for example, it also moves the elbow and the shoulder with it and different things like that. You have a timeline at the bottom of the screen here where you can see moving it from frame to frame. Here's a cut shot to Inkscape, another free program where each of the frames was drawn individually and then exported into individual PNG images, I believe, and then imported into GIMP. The nice thing about this, whenever you're doing animation, you're going to want to use a program like Inkscape or GIMP to draw your art. Then you can modify it by your seeing here and then you can export it because sometimes the animation programs don't have a really great drawing interface. Here we're back into Blender and again this is not me doing this video. This is someone else's video here on YouTube that I've used. This next one we're going to look at pencil. I'll show you the interface for it. Pencil is really cool. It's a very simple program. You just draw frame by frame. It doesn't have a lot of the same features that you're going to find in Blender and Synthig as far as doing tweens or automated, having objects, redraw themselves. You have to draw every frame individually and I'll show you the actual work, what it looks like when it was rendered. Here's an example of some work that I found here on YouTube that was released under a Creative Commons license and it just shows an example of some of the kind of work you can do, something you can produce using pencil. The artist did an excellent job with this piece. It's more of a basic tool. It is limited. That's pencil and it's a pretty cool program. This next one to be is similar to pencil but I feel like it has a lot more features. What does it have more features? I'll open up the interface for toopy here. Again, just keep in mind until now those first three that we saw were available on Windows, Macintosh and Linux. But this program toopy is a Linux only program. They're seeking donations right now that the developer is a pretty awesome guy from what I've been able to gather. They're currently developing this program further. If you want to see more features and more stability and have it brought to Windows and Macintosh, check out their website and do some research on it and get involved and figure out how you can help bring some of the work. That's a nice thing about open source and about these free programs is that it really is a community effort to get these features here for us. Here's an example of something you can do without having to draw frame by frame. You automatically have the background scrolling across the back. You have the wheels rotating with the rotation tween. Then the car is actually just staying static there in the middle. This next one is from another artist here on YouTube that released their work under a Creative Commons license. This just shows an example of drawing frame by frame. I believe that blue part of the head that we saw was drawn and then that image is going to be locked for the head so it's not moving. Now each of the eyes is being redrawn here, the eyes and the eyebrows are redrawn in a separate frame. Then we'll see here's what it looks like if you scroll through and watch each frame by frame. Let's just a quick example of doing frame by frame animation using this program toopy. Pretty cool. Pretty cool stuff. I like toopy a lot and I'm excited to see where it's going to go in the future. The last one we're going to look at is Kim. You probably know about it. It's similar to Photoshop. Here's what it looks like. I'm just going to show you in this video an example of how you can use it for animation. There's this fly animation here on a fly image on a transparent background. The artist here is mapping the background, mapping the fly around and now he's rotating it, orienting it the way it needs to go. Then he's going to create frames for each one of those and export them. Each one of these images is a separate frame. Then he uses GIMP to create, I think it's like a GIF image, .GIF image, to loop create a looping animation of this fly walking around on this transparent background. It's pretty cool. It just shows you an example of a way you might not have known that you can use GIMP to create a simple animation. Those are the programs I wanted to show you. Hopefully this video has been informative and showed you what's out there and available as far as free animation software goes. Most of the time you don't need to download and pay for or buy an expensive animation program for just getting into it. Definitely get familiar with these and play with them and they're going to be able to do most likely what you're going to want to do. I've got a little 12 year old brother that uses blender and pencil and GIMP and he creates awesome, awesome stuff. If you can do it, you can do it. Thanks for watching this video. Check out my other ones here on YouTube or my website, TJFree.com. Take care. We'll catch you on the next one.