Top Sites For Creating Animation

The Death of Xtranormal

It seems a while back a lot of people were on fire about Xtranormal. If you’ve never heard of Xtranormal, it’s a website where you can create your own animations in 3D with full text to speech options. It used to be free but those days are gone. The desktop version “State” is still free but at 500MB it’s not a small download. Plus you’ll find that once you’ve wasted a lunch time downloading it you still have to pay for most of the characters and scenes.

So what other alternatives are out there that can deliver decent animations for free? I had a quick hunt around the internet and found 3 possibles. To test them, I created a small script for two characters and applied that to each site I found. The script is a shameless plug to our Help sheets but it served it’s purpose to test out each site fairly.

DVolver

First up we have DVolver. A very quick and easy approach to creating animations, the site takes you step by step through the process of creating your masterpiece. You pick your background and sky from a pre-set list for your scene. You then choose the plot from a list of four options such as “rendez-vous” which is basically a chat. Next you are prompted to select your characters – two can be selected from a list of characters. You can then enter the dialogue between the two characters, each character has 3 lines of text. Finally you can add some music and you’re done. You can add as many scenes as you like to complete the animation.

Advantages: Very quick and very easy. I created the scene in about 5 minutes.

Disadvantages: Limited sets and characters. The characters might not seem appropriate for an educational setting but that might be down to personal taste.

GoAnimate

Next up we have probably the best of the lot with GoAnimate. You’ll need to register but that’s free and painless. I registered a while back and so far haven’t had any spam. Once registered you can go ahead and create your animations. There are several templates you can choose from and within each template there are a wide range of themed characters and settings. Some you have to pay for but there are loads for free. Another great thing is that GoAnimate has a lot of “community” characters that you can use for free as well. Animation is not as slick as Xtranormal in that they are not 3D models but there are a lot of options and control you have over the cartoon. Text to speech is possible but alas you have to pay. You can see from the video I created that I used the speech bubbles which work just fine. In fact, the text to speech can sometimes sound a bit…odd (to be polite). Once created you can embed the video using the handy embed code (let us know if you need any more help with that). Alternatively you can download the video but you’ll need to pay for that. All in all, a very good service that isn’t too scary to use. I was able to create the sample pretty quickly and had quite a bit of fun exploring all the different options.

Advantages: Very flexible, lots of free sets and characters, not too difficult to get up and running with

Disadvantages: Will it be free for much longer?

Zimmer Twins

Finally we have what is essentially a kids site called Zimmer Twins. You only get two characters (well three if you include the cat) to control and the process is very limited. Having said that, it’s very easy to create a simple animation. Whether or not they are appropriate for higher education is another matter. You can control quite a few options like the scene and what the characters are doing. No text to speech but you do get speech bubbles plus some interesting character actions.

Advantages: quick and easy to use, some nice facial expressions on the characters

Disadvantages: very much orientated towards children and so might not be appropriate for higher education, only 3 characters to use

Voki

I’ve not included this in the “three” as you can only have one character pretty much talking to the screen but I thought it was interesting enough to mention. There are quite a few characters you can choose from and the text to speech facility is actually not that bad. I’ve attempted to replicate the two character dialogue to give a taste of what could be done. The site itself is very easy to use – simply select your character, background and type in your text. You can adjust the voice of the character and I would recommend going through the different voices as not all sound good.

Advantages: fast, easy and quite nice speech patterns

Disadvantages: only one character, mono-dialogue

Conclusion?

I personally found all of the sites easy to use, quick to pick up and relatively painless to use. The next question is whether or not they are appropriate for your needs. GoAnimate certainly seems to be the most flexible and so I would say if you only have time to check out one, go for that. The other two are nice and simple – but maybe too simple. Have a try, and let me know what you think. If you find any other sites out there that offer free animation pass on the links!

Have fun and happy animating….