The best animation software for 2D animating is the Tango engine by Google, which was launched in 2013 and now has a lot of features that can make the user experience easy to use. As an example, you have more tools like the “Color” slider or various other elements (like shadows) available or you can use the “Pix-Render” technique. One thing I found really useful in this engine is the ability to export 3D model files, so there are much easier ways to work with these assets.
The next best solution would be using Blender. This product depends on the well-known game improvement device called Python and it utilizes the equivalent codebase. However, whenBlender was released in 2014, it does not provide one or two-dimensional animation and instead, it offers several other methods (like modelling), making working with 2D artworks and animations possible. Among others, I think using either Blender or Tango is the best option if you want your project to look better. In addition, both of them support the most common workflows for 2D animation including adding 3D elements such as textures and lights to your drawings. Although both of them offer some additional things that might take time in writing scripts (both for creating new models and exporting them into multiple other programs) the main advantage of the platform is that it’s very clean. On top of that, both platforms also cover a number of different types of 2D artworks and include features for creating those, which I will list below.
Tango
Tango is the most used platform for creating professional 2D animation. If you use Tango, you need only to create models and add a script that takes care of their creation (or export them for another program.) You can find a great repository here with all the models you need for the most part and then download them from GitHub or your favourite website.
Blender
As mentioned above, Blender offers a very good set of features to create 2D animatronics. For this reason, we will compare it based on a couple of examples. First, let’s see what is Blenders model file format which consists of a JSON array of objects and corresponding vertex information, along with a single image and then try reading about how to get your model.
Now, let’s do exactly the same process, but with Tango by using the import_2d.py library. We will create 4D models with a simple linear transformation and we will use only one type of colour. With this, our model should be ready to export into a 3D vector file. In case you don’t feel comfortable with Blender, it could be easier to change everything you export to Blender. Another way of converting models into vectors is to use BatchNorm. To use it in Tango, use the xml2bv3.BatchNorm class. You can read more about batch normalization in my article. Now let’s do it with Blender!
Blender V3
The first advantage that makes Blender stand out from the rest is the ease of use. All you need is to import the BlenderV3 module and let’s start off with importing four Dense V3 (3D) nets. These nets allow us to create any dimension we want. A sample example can be seen in the picture below. It shows the model that we created in Tango (above).
Blender V3 Model Example
One of the biggest differences between Blender and Tango is that Blender allows us to move data through an object to make transformations and we do this from back to front. Also, because Blender and Tango both use the N-Dimensional arrays, we will see how to convert your initial 3D data into a 2D array to apply various transformations as well. Please note that each BlenderV3Model represents a 3D object! So let’s assume a cube with 64 sides and 64 weights. Given by the code snippet above:
Next steps, if you need help with 3D artworks, Blenders provides a suite of services from building a scene to controlling the whole canvas using various graphical elements. For instance, it supports multi-part lighting systems that allow us to light the scene, as well as many other features like multisampling, colour scaling, and other techniques. For Tango, there are a variety of plugins that allow us to create 2D models or even 3D artworks (like lighting) with just a few lines of code. The Blender people group likewise stays aware of new turns of events and you can look at which ones are important to you overall.
