Animation+ - Nigeria's First Open Source & Quality I.T developers

Blender Nation

Another open source application which to me has one of the best quality in terms of output. Be it vector graphics, animated movies, image creation or banners, i mean this baby does it all in style. it's rendering engine is so swift and fast. This is no doubt my best open source animation tool kit. It's potentials gets better of course when one embeds the plugins meant for Blender.

Blender is a complete 3D & Animation tool available for Linux, Mac & Windows O.S. This applicaton has a reputaion of bringing out the best in a designer.

Inkscape

Inkscape has so much followers that even Ubuntu users are talking about it. I watched a presentation where a developer designed a banner on inkscape and fell in love with it almost immediately. This tool provides graphic slides and sharp picture quality from my observation. The fact that it's open source makes it a double blessing. I love this tools and as a friend would say, every application has it's area of expertise.

Inkscape provide a forum or news group anyone could join to either contribute or learn from.

Adobe Flash CS4

Adobe's acquisition (some say it's a merger) of Macromedia saw the adoption of this application to it's suite of softwares. Not an open source package but most developers especially when it comes to vector graphics, cannot ignore this baby. Flash has the best animation feature compared to any other animation tool out there. I call it the Igwe (the King) of all animation tools. For shockwave movies, animated gif's, graphic design, animated movies and more. You can even convert movies from other formats to it's native Flv format or for streaming on the web.

Adobe AfterEffect

After Effect (though not an open source tool) is definately a leader when it comes to animated movies, movie editing and graphic design. Another product of Adobe has caught my fancy for a long time now. My only problem with it is the fact that it's so hardware hungry you'll need at least one gig of ram to have it run effectively.

GIMP

Another open source tool used by many developers and graphics maniacs. Basically known to be a photo editing application, GIMP is also suitable for GIF animations and does a lot of swift photo smoothning effects.GIMP is usually shiped with most Linux distribution and is also a fundamental part of the GNOME desktop project. If you have a GNOME desktop running, then you should have GIMP suited up. A Wndows versio is also available for MS Windows users.

SwishMax

A vector graphic tool for producing animated movies in shockwave formats. Swish is a much easier tool for swf animators and it provides a user with much more options in terms of pre-animated movies. This tool is also compactible with Javascript Language and of course the ever growing Action script. If there's a presentation to make with so little time, Swish definately makes life easy for you.