re: You may or may not have heard of this, but there's a totally free animation software called OpenToonz. It was created and used by the people who made the anime Princess Mononoke and it's actually pretty great. It's open source too, so that means it has plug-ins.

Another thing I found completely changed how I animate. It's a weird technique I came up with. Idk if there's a technique out there that people use that's close to it or not, but I couldn't really find anything about it when I tried looking it up. -

I was playing around on Flipnote and got annoyed at how long it always takes to just animate a simple motion...I also got really tired of redrawing things because it was off by a hair, and just started animating a bunch of dots on the screen. Then I thought, "why can't I just use dots to quickly lay out motions instead of hoping I get it right the fist time?" Turns out you can do this, and it's super f,ucking easy and fast.
exapmle: If I were animating an arm lifting up, I'd place a dot near the body where I'll draw the elbow (sometimes with a line going to it, to represent a bone) and make the dot move how I want the elbow to move. Then I'd do the same for the end of the forearm next, and so on. You can use this with /anything/; It's really useful with swaying objects like cloth, hair, animal tails, or anything with 'ease in ease out' motion. It's so much faster and easier doing this...

"exapmle"?

*example

^ e x a p m l e

exapmle... that makes me think of apple for some reason, like some kinda weird mutated apple

also ahh these duck bois, i love them

i cant remember who of these 3 was my favorite as a kid though :^( feels bad, man

re: Ohh, you didn't make an Adobe subscription, did you? :^( Subscription based apps are a big NO for me. If there's an app I like, but it's "rent only", I don't fu,cking pay for it (yarr harr, matey).
Adobe Animate is mainly vector based, pricey, and has a garbage UI from what I can tell. OpenToonz supports both raster and vector, is free, has an ok UI, and has a bunch of Youtube tutorials to help out. I haven't used it much, but I don't think it would be too hard to get used to. It's free, so it's definitely worth downloading and trying out.

I actually don't like motion tweening or puppet rigging...It always looks like a sh,itty early 2000's flash game. Frame by frame has a much more charming look to it, if you ask me...

woo-oo

love it!!