Maybe you’ve got a presentation coming up which you want to make a little more exciting, or maybe you’re just a little bored. Regardless of why, there are plenty of reasons why you might want to try your hand at creating animations.
But animating is a skill which takes a lot of time to learn and requires dedicated and often expensive software. If you’re just looking to dip your toe into animating or just need quick results, then that simply won’t do.
Luckily, there is a wide range of online options that alleviate these issues. Here are seven of the best of them.
1. Animaker
First on this list comes Animaker, an online video editor with a tremendous variety of features. Animaker lets you edit short videos, GIFs, and even live videos. Its most unique feature, however, is its ability to let you create animations with just the click of a button.
Animaker is built from the ground up to let you create seamless animations of just about anything. It’s truly customizable, and gives you all the tools you need in order to create any animation you want.
You can start by creating your very own characters in Animaker’s character builder. There’s a ton of variety here in terms of different faces, hairs, clothes, and more, so your characters can look however you need them to.
From there, extensive facial animations add more personality to your animation, and you can even include a voiceover with auto-lip-sync, so you don’t need to waste any time animating your character’s lips.
Any objects you add in from Animaker’s extensive library can also be automatically animated with its Smart Move feature, which handles all the heavy lifting for you.
Animaker does exist as a free service, but with a number of rather large caveats. Free videos will be exported with a watermark and a default Animaker outro. There are also a limited number of downloads and significantly fewer additional features such as custom fonts, commercial rights, or templates.
2. Renderforest
Next up comes Renderforest, an online platform that helps you create high-quality videos, logos, graphics, websites, and animations. The focus here is on the animation options which Renderforest gives you, but there’s plenty more that it’s capable of.
Creating an animation with Renderforest is both easy and effective. Renderforest’s approach here uses templates, which it has a large number of professionally animated options to choose from.
Once you’ve chosen the template, you can customize it or leave it as is. You can upload new visuals, select fonts, and tweak the final product with a wide range of different tools. This lets you really make the template your own.
If you’re looking to explain or describe something, then you can add audio to your animation. Music or a voice-over can help to sell your idea, and you can reinforce what is being said with text boxes and images as well.
All of these features are free, but once again comes with a variety of pretty hefty caveats. If you remain a free user, you’ll be stuck with a maximum of 360p resolution and a limit of only three minutes per video. You’ll have watermarks placed on all of your work, amongst other things as well.
There are more expensive premium options if you’re looking to remove these features or add new ones, such as font uploads or watermark removal.
3. Doratoon
If you’re looking for an online platform dedicated to creating animations and animations only, then Doratoon might be a choice better suited to what you’re looking for.
If you’re newer to creating animations or PowerPoints and unfamiliar with a lot of the tools involved, then don’t fret because Doratoon has you covered. It offers a large variety of different templates for you to choose from and work from.
If you’re more of a power user, then Doratoon has a lot to offer still as well. There’s a huge range of characters (including animated facial expressions), stock props, backgrounds, and even stock footage and photos if you’re looking for something photo-realistic instead.
The starting price for Doratoon is zero, meaning you can make use of it entirely for free. This locks you into free templates, fonts, soundtracks, and objects only, however, which severely limits how much you can get done with the tool.
Higher resolutions such as 720p and 1080p are also locked behind higher tiers, as well as various tools such as AI dubbing and drawing, and an increase in maximum video length. The free version includes a watermark as well.
4. Biteable
Next on this list comes Biteable, an online animation maker with a truly huge number of templates and scenes available for you to use.
Biteable features a variety of different templates for you to use, but more than that, it makes creating animations entirely from scratch easy as well.
All you need to do to get started with Biteable is to choose from a selection of scenes, which you can then string together to produce your story. These scenes can be animations, stock photos, or clips provided by Biteable, or you can upload your own.
This is all free, but premium options exist as well. Free videos created with Biteable will feature a watermark on them and lesser maximum resolution. Premium options include higher resolutions, commercial usage rights, and video analytics.
5. Pixteller
Finally, we have Pixteller. Pixteller is another online animation creation platform which allows you to create projects seamlessly from a wide range of professional templates.
Pixteller features hundreds of animation templates to choose from. Once chosen, you can edit every aspect of the animation from the photos, illustrations, and even the shapes. You can add additional features as well, such as brand colors and fonts.
Pixteller even lets you adjust each element on a frame-by-frame basis by changing the properties of the element. This means that you can create and adjust the motion that exists in its templates to accomplish just about anything.
There is no free plan available with Pixteller. Instead, there are two premium plans to choose from. The first is for graphic images only, which means that if you’re looking to make use of the features mentioned here, you’ll need to go with the more expensive of the two.
Animation Creation Is Just the Beginning
If you’re just getting started with this type of thing, then the tools mentioned here are all invaluable resources to get a taste for what you could maybe one day achieve with animation.
If this has sparked an interest, there’s a wide variety of different tools that can cater to all sorts of audiences and styles, as long as you know where to look.