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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

I don't disagree with most of what you're saying, but I wish there was a decent open-source 2d Vector animation software that could compete with Flash/Animate.

I know Krita has a decent animation tool, but it's only raster, and I haven't encountered a really good vector tool yet.

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As someone else mentioned, Blender is actually quite decent for vector animation. You might need to modify your workflow slightly, but using grease pencil, bone skinning and curve tools is enough for very decent 2D animations. A nice bonus is that everything is technically still in 3D space as well, so you can easily add true layering, DoF, lighting and particle systems for instance.

The biggest downside to Blender is that the UI can be a bit intimidating since it covers so many aspects of CGI.

Looking at a few videos, it definitely looks pretty sweet. I guess in my mind I've always just thought of everything in Blender outside of 3d modeling as "tacked on", which really isn't fair.

I know exactly what you mean. Blender has a sort of reverse identity crisis. It does so many things really well, yet these things are overshadowed by its even more excellent 3D capabilities.

It's by far the most powerful and versatile piece of OSS I've ever used. I'd heavily recommend getting into it if you're a creative in general. It also has a really nice community to help out when you inevitably get lost in the menus.

Have you tried working with Blender's Grease Pencil?

https://www.blender.org/features/grease-pencil/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jrvfmhI9h8

I have not, though I would be somewhat surprised if it is as straightforward to use as Flash/Animate. I'll give it a try soon.

I've been working on one for a while now that's very slowly coming together: https://github.com/logicalshift/flowbetween if you're interested.

I've been building out some backend stuff lately so there's a bunch of new features waiting to go in. https://github.com/Logicalshift/flo_draw has some demonstrations of the sort of procedural animation features I'm planning on adding, for instance.

Haiku Animator recently went free and open source: https://www.haikuanimator.com

Never heard of that one, but it's also very recently open-sourced. It's NodeJS with a browser-based GUI? Nice they're not going Electron. I wish there was a Flatpak but will definitely try out.

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This code was open-sourced in August 2021 when Haiku shut down the commercial collaboration/storage services connected to Haiku Animator.

Have you looked at synfig? I haven't gotten to use it yet, but it seems like it might be of use to you

Oh my, I haven't looked at Synfig in nearly a decade! I found it pretty unusable and clunky back then, but ten years might as well be a century for OSS. I'll give it a try.

I'm in a somewhat similar boat. I wish there was an easy tool for svg animations. Essentially I want simple translations, transforms and attribute changes (opacity mainly) on my inkscape drawn svgs. At the moment the best solution I have found is to manually edit the svgs.

> I wish there was a decent open-source 2d Vector animation software that could compete with Flash/Animate.

What limitations does https://www.synfig.org have?

I tried Synfig rendering to lottie and the vast majority of lottie ouputs were invalid.

Usecase: export to Discord / Telegram animated stickers and my Godot Engine extension module for lottie.

Tough to say, I haven't used Synfig in a long long time. I'll give it another try and see if it's improved.

Glaxnimate is evolving well: https://glaxnimate.mattbas.org/

I'm curious if you think an exe of a very old version of flash might be enough for you.

Possibly yes, I was a big fan of Flash 8, but of course the older it gets, the more out of date it is, not to mention that I do not believe that Flash 8 will even work on modern Macs anymore (because of Apple dropping 32 bit support).

Right now, I have a couple-year-old permanent license to Toon Boom, which is very good, but of course it is very much not open source (and I do not believe they even let you do permanent licenses anymore). I'm not an animator, I just play with stuff occasionally, so I can't really justify ongoing costs, which is part of why I would prefer an OSS version.

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