My 9 year old daughter loves Five Nights at Freddie's videos on YouTube. She wants to learn how to do animation. I'm not interested in sinking a ton of money into a computer and software but I'd like to encourage her interest if it costs a few hundred bucks. Can anyone make a recommendation? Her current desktop runs on Linux but I'm expecting I'll have to go either Windows or Apple on a new box for this...
From what I remember, Blender seems to be very highly regarded, but might be a little too much for a beginner. Runs on Linux, too.
Blender, for a 9 year old, no way (unless she’s a real hot shot) It’s a complex program (3D) with a rather convoluted interface. I tried to learn it to do simple models / animation but gave up because it was not worth the effort (I could do most of what I would want to do with the simple Illustrator tools).
I don’t know of any free stuff. What type of animation are we talking about? 3D? Puppet style, traditional (onion skin type)?
There is a website / program that I remember that was used a few years ago to create (generally) really hokey 3D animations, but I don’t remember what it is.
Google says this:
If you're watching FNAF videos chances are you are looking at a product of Source Film Maker. It's free, it's older software and I would imagine any newer Windows computer would handle it fine. I've never used it myself but it's tremendously popular and must be well documented. Download the software for her and bookmark some tutorials and wiki pages and she can probably figure it out.
My son is into animation started with a stop motion system from Hue Animation and now is using IKitmovie which has a bunch more features but is still easy to use. He is starting to work with 2D animation with Anime Studio. All of these are not full featured professional software packages but he has been able to learn to use them on his own and plenty of tutorials on youtube.
I'd be happy with anything to get her started. South Park sophistication would be fine. :)
It’s funny you mention South Park. Although the first episodes where done with paper cutouts, the later ones are done with Maya, a very high end 3D animation system.
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