This collection of free and premium video creation tools can help you create your very own 2D and 3D character animations and bring your ideas to life. Targeted at both professional animators and amateurs in the marketing and freelance industry, this list of tools is suitable for anyone who’s interested in making their own animated videos.
Animaker
Despite being fairly new to the market, Animaker will amaze you with its advanced designing and customization options. Animaker allows users to create complex animated videos by setting multiple movements, facial expressions, and character actions. Users can choose from a broad range of premade scenes and even apply animated screen effects to create a truly engaging atmosphere. Apart from its comprehensive gallery of premade characters, objects, scenes, and props Animaker also has a big collection of free music and sound effects.
GoAnimate
Go Animate is one of the top competitors on the market and presents one of the best options out there for creating truly engaging animated videos. This tool does not only offer an excellent drag-and-drop editing option with multiple designs and customization options but it has one of the most comprehensive libraries of premade characters, scenes, and objects you can find. What makes it truly stand out from the other tools is its amazing character building feature which allows users to create basically an unlimited amount of unique characters.
Animatron
The tool has 200 pre-animated sets which can be easily changed via drag-and-drop. You can choose from thousands of free animated characters, props, and scenes or take advantage of some of the professionally designed ones for a small fee. Another important feature is the tool’s advanced object customization which allows the change of colors, elements positioning, and more within a premade object or character. With Animatron you can also export both in GIF and HD video, and even create your own HTML5 animated banners
Video Scribe
VideoScribe is a premium video design software created by Sparkol. The tool is known as designers’ go-to instrument for creating unique whiteboard animated videos. The tool has plenty of features, among which are the options to fully customize your characters and choose from a vast library of royalty free images and audio files.
PowToon
With PawToon you can create animated videos and presentations via a web-based drag-and-drop design tool with an advanced set of design features. Pawtoons has a large collection of premade objects in different styles, like paper, line art, and cartoon. You can easily switch between scenes and replace them with template scenes from the tool’s library. Characters have a preset range of actions and can be moved from point to point within the scene. The tool has a long list of fonts and objects to choose from and allows users to create amazing videos in minutes.
Moovly
Moovly is a simplified web-based tool for creating animated videos. Apart from offering a wide variety of design options, Moovly is absolutely free which makes is one of the top choices in the industry for marketers and freelancers. Video editing with Moovly is done via a user-friendly dashboard that allows drag-and-drop customization.
CrazyTalk
With CrazyTalk you can turn your two-dimensional drawings and static images into life-like characters. You can puppeteer facial impressions with mouse movements and export avatars from any image. Lip synching with voiceover audio files is completely automated. You can also turn your own photos into 3D faces and export animated avatars to other animation tools to work with full body character animations.
iClone 6
iClone 6 is a real-time 3D animation software that allows users to create and customize 3D characters with realistic or stylized looks and build animated videos with a range of premade scenes and props. Some of the main features of the tool are the option for advanced facial animation and puppeteering, auto lip-synching, and even an advanced soft cloth physics animation. The tool offers advanced soft shadow and lighting effects, multiple camera systems with a mini viewpoint and a live switch, as well as advanced scene generation of natural landscapes and cityscapes.
