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.

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.

---

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.

darktable + Hugin have me covered for photography. I just want better Wayland support. Specifically I'm waiting for Wayland to get color management merged--even if it only supports standard definition and old ICC profile formats as a stop-gap.

Never had seen Hugin before, I was wondering how people did that open source recently.

And with respect to color management and Wayland with the rumored next release of nvidia drivers potentially supporting Wayland that's about the only thing that would stop me from switching on all my machines. I know there is an open issue for working on that in both the Wayland official protocols and wl-roots so hopefully soon.

Hugin has gotten me great results in the past. My most popular panorama (https://flic.kr/p/2gw93QX), you can't even find the seams despite being quite wide at 5 × 3 shots. It handled 16-shot panoramas well too (https://flic.kr/p/GLsDNh), even though Flickr won't render those resolutions. I've even used it for focus stacking (https://flic.kr/p/27kMsrX) to keep a narrow depth-of-field on an object that needed 2 focus points to stay sharp.

Darktable is amazing.

I wish we had an alternative to photoshop as well. Personally, for me, gimp doesn't even come close to what photoshop has to offer.

Not open source but affordable without subscription model: Affinity Photo. They have more tools. Windows, Mac and iPad, not Linux sadly.

Krita has been a perfectly adequate replacement for me as a bitmap editor. It's more stable and more refined than Gimp in my experience. It's obviously not a carbon copy of PS, so if you depend on certain PS features ymmv.

I bought affinity photo and design on sale ($50 for both) and they have solved my need to have Adobe PS and Illustrator.

As for After Effects / Premiere Pro I've been using DaVinci Resolve / HitFilm.

How did you replace AE?

Admittedly I'm only dabbling on a hobby level when it comes to video editing and composition. For what I've been doing Blender has been more than sufficient. It has a pretty good track editor a la Premiere and you can use the composition pipeline to enhance visuals.

Of course Blender also provides everything you'd need for visual effects, tracking and separate passes since it's a full 3D suite as well.

https://shotcut.org - has done fairly well for me. I believe `DaVinci - Resolve` is a paid tool which also has a free linux version (with restrictions).

Honestly, video editing can be crashy and resource-intensive so don't be afraid to pay for something.

Two years ago, I tried video editing for the first time. It was a small project, a 15 second video with multiple video and audio tracks, some basic white balance and color correction, and minor animations. I tried the 3 major FOSS video editors at the time, OpenShot, ShotCut, and KdenLive, in order to figure out which one was more appropriate for me. I also watched some tutorial videos on each of the video editors. My conclusion was that OpenShot was too basic for even such a small project, KdenLive was usable but lacked some tools which made editing somewhat burdensome, and ShotCut was the winner with its toolset and UI, although it crashed the most out of the three.

However, even with such a simple project, none of the three FOSS tools were easy to use, and all were barriers to my efficiency and creativity. I then searched for commercial offerings, and have been using Davinci Resolve, where even the free basic version was light years beyond the FOSS choices in terms of speed, ease of use, and features. As someone who uses FOSS tools (GIMP, Inkscape) for ideological reasons, I was a bit disappointed by how large of a gap there was between FOSS and commercial video editors. I haven't looked at the FOSS versions since then, perhaps they have improved.

Davinci Resolve is free on all platforms. Davinci Resolve Studio is paid, with lifetime license which includes upgrades forever.

> Davinci Resolve Studio is paid

And only $300. Once. Resolve is amazing. It replaced both Premiere and AE in my studio. Not bad for something that used to cost about $600k. You can get away with a hell of a lot in the free version as well.

History of Resolve: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WvP5_HFQSk

Blender is remarkably good for video editing and compositing.