Piga Animator

Piga Animator is an in-development two-dimensional computer animation tool by Piga Software. It is being designed for the Symel animation project, which is a free content web cartoon project of technical director Graham L. Wilson hosted by Malcolm Wilson Multimedia. The tool's development officially began on August 19, 2008 inside Gambas 1.0.19, but its development has since sprawled out into several years of sporadic experimentation and conceptual development, as well as two generations of Gambas (2.x and 3.x). The first releasable version, code-named "Adam", is in active development and from there is hoped to progress via an open development model.

Components

 * Main Stage (for sprite-based animation)
 * Gambas Performance System (cut-out animations)
 * Piga Speech Generator (amplitudinal lip-synch tool)
 * Piga Character Creator (creates different types of animated characters)

Features
Unlike other free software 2D animation tools, such as Pencil2D for traditional animation and Synfig or Tupi for vector animation, Piga Animator is based on digital puppetry and machinimatic techniques (as well described in this article by Free Software Magazine, or this HowStuffWorks article); noted by Graham L. Wilson specifically as a "game engine developer's approach to animation." This is based on the usage of real-time interactive actors, which can be ordered to transverse and otherwise interact with the environment, which in turn can apply an effect on them. A selection of similarly real-time props will be available as well, all of which are intended to be usable within an in-built basic physics engine and other basic systems for procedural animation.

Similar Programs

 * MovieSandBox - free 3D real-time animator with particle models
 * Animata - free 3D real-time animator focused on input response
 * Pyppet - free machinima and virtual-worlds streaming server
 * Crazy Talk Animator - proprietary digital puppetry tool by Reallusion