Creative fun on the PC

Having obtained some suitable hardware in the form of a webcam and graphics tablet, I decided to expand my collection of complementary software tools. Expect some new and exciting content soon(ish)!

I've always wanted to have a go at stop motion animation with my webcam, and although this is possible with the bundled software, Anasazi is freely available from these folks and offers more useful features such as live onion skinning. See this post for a good example of stop motion animation.

Moho is a "2D vector-based cartoon animation application" which has a free trial version that I'm having a play with. The appeal for me was the ability to create Macromedia Flash swf files: I have been inspired after seeing plenty of Flash anims on the likes of Newgrounds (not linked because of Gator popups), wired.com, with a special mention of the excellent Pygmy Shrew and Mourning Leopard. The free trial version only allows greyscale exported flash files with no sound, but that will do me fine for now while I get used to using Moho.

Finally, I got hold of another free program: Art of Illusion. It's a 3D modelling and rendering studio written in Java with some impressive examples of achievable images.