Hi everybody,
My question is in fact more precise than what the title lends to think.
I have an amateur project of doing some 2D animation to go with children songs I've recorded (I'm a musician). I spent a lot of time learning OpenToonz and almost finished my first animation. Since I'm a very bad drawer, I found a childish style that, I think, fits really well with my subject and is in line with my lack of talent. However, I have the feeling I'm using OpenToonz in a way it wasn't designed for, and after dozens of hours spent with it, I have a lot of workflow problems. I'd like to know if another software could have a better workflow for what I want. I'm gonna describe the style of my animations and my requirements:
It should have good audio integration and a good workflow for animating synchronously to it. The way I work is by creating 4-5 childish idle poses for my characters and cycling them in 3's (to give some life), and I do my movements (included squash and stretch) by moving/tranforming the entire layer. I do a lot of camera movements for easily bringing some life.
Doing so in OpenToonz is cumbersome: I can't easily copy/paste my frames cycles with it's keys in another part of the clip, if I do so, it offsets all the frames already defined after the past point. It'd hugely annoying.
I'm waiting for your advice, either on OpenToonz or for another software.
Check out Rough Animator. It's only $5.00 . It's cross-platform (Windows- Mac - iOS - Android) . There's not much in Rough Animator in terms of fancy camera movement or effects, but there's a script which allows you to import your layers from Rough Animator into After Effects or Toonboom Harmony , so you add effects or complex camera moves to the animation if need be.
If you have iPad Pro look at Callipeg . It has many more features than Rough Animator and is in active development , adding new features on a fairly regular basis. It's developed by several people who used to work for TVPaint . (Free to try it for 7 days, then after that it is a subscription of $1.20 a month , or $12.00 a year or buy a permanent license for a one time payment of $60.00) .
I should also mention that Animation Paper is an app to keep your eye on. Animation Paper is a software that has been under development for a long time . It's in the final steps of beta testing now , but no official release date has been announced. Soon , I would imagine. It seems to have a lot of good features and will be a one-time payment of $79.00 .
I like the idea of OpenToonz (free, full-featured , comprehensive animation software) but in my brief experience trying to work with it I find that OpenToonz is cumbersome to use and it frequently crashes (I'm on MacOS ... it may be a different experience on Windows). Just so you know , I'm a professional, I have licenses of both TVPaint and Toonboom Harmony , so honestly I don't have a lot of motivation to stick it out with OpenToonz when it acts up. I'd rather not bother. I might try harder to find ways of working with OpenToonz if it were my only choice.
Speaking of free, open-source software , another one you might investigate is Blender. Inside of Blender (which is a 3D modeling and animation app) there is "Grease Pencil" , which allows you to do hand-drawn animation , but place the drawing in a "3D" environment. https://www.blender.org/features/grease-pencil/