: Are there any animation programs other than Flash? Possible Duplicate: What programs can be used to make animations? I saw this stack exchange and thought it'd be the perfect place

@Radia289

Microsoft's Silverlight platform is a direct Flash competitor and has been ported to *nix as the open source Moonlight (part of the Mono project). I've never used Silverlight or Moonlight, but I'm sure it can do animations. I'm not sure of the quality of the IDE though.

However, the current trend these days, and much more popular than Silverlight IMO, is using HTML5 Canvas+JS to do animations. However, again, the lack of a specialized IDE/animation app is probably gonna make it difficult to produce professional-grade animations. There just isn't anything like Flash/Director for HTML5 Canvas. (Mugeda is supposedly a cloud app that lets you create and host HTML5 animations, but I haven't used it.)

If you want to produce professional grade animations, then your best bet is probably Blender. Blender is traditionally a 3D animation platform, but as can be seen with South Park's use of Maya, 3D animation programs can also be used to create very effective 2D animation.

Other industry standard animation programs include:


Apple Motion
Maya (previously Alias/PowerAnimator/Animator)
Toon Boom Animate
After Effects

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