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Animators have more options for hand-drawn software than ever before, a fact that is reflected daily in the projects we feature on the site. For example, the short Junkyard was produced with TVPaint, the TV series Sarah and Duck was made with CelAction2D, and Disney’s new Mickey Mouse shorts are animated in ToonBoom Harmony. Of course, there’s the ubiquitous Adobe Flash which is still the most widely used 2D animation tool, though its influence has been waning in recent years.

Part of the reason that Flash has been losing marketshare in the U.S. and Canada is due to ToonBoom’s Animate line of software, which is considered by many to be an affordable alternative with better workflow and a superior set of tools for vector-based 2D animation. The company recently announced the pre-launch of Animate 3 and Animate Pro 3, which adds some much desired features like the ability to taper pencil vector lines, draw with textures and output in 64-bit high-resolution. Many of these features were previously available only in ToonBoom’s much higher priced Harmony software.

Here are some of the new features announced by ToonBoom:

Toon Boom Animate 3 highlights:

• True Pencil: Animate 3 gives you the ability to draw with True Pencil, a pencil line with variable thickness that supports pressure sensitivity. Draw clean lines with the pencil and have the ability to modify the lines easily. You can apply the style across hundreds of drawings. Incorporate texture on your lines for cool effects.

Toon Boom Animate Pro 3 highlights:

• Bone Deform: Animate Pro 3 now comes with Bone-style Deform! Bring your cut-out characters to the next level by adding deformers to bend drawings around bones and articulations. Apply deform to vector drawings, textures, or imported bitmaps.

Both products are now supercharged on a 64-bit core. This gives you the freedom to use more of the computer’s resources, and output high-resolution files for a professional-quality production. In addition, they both support standard two-finger Touch Gestures for zooming, rotating, and scaling of the canvas, when using a tablet. Finally, they both benefit from interface enhancements designed to simplify workflow and streamline the animation process.

Pricing and Availability: During this time-limited pre-launch period, you can buy Toon Boom Animate 3 for $599 US and Toon Boom Animate Pro 3 for $999 US – a saving of $100 US. Customers will receive a version 2 license which will be replaced by version 3 upon release. Customers owning previous versions of Animate and Animate Pro may upgrade on release day only.

To learn more and pre-order the software, visit ToonBoom’s website.

I'm still on an Adobe Flash kick and for the past couple of weeks I've been knee deep in ActionScript. Well, maybe more like neck deep. But after lots of Lynda training and lots more reading on top of that, I feel like I'm FINALLY getting the gist of it. My animation skills are still pretty rough, but I've been having lots of fun programming the ActionScript. Here are two games that a I created so far...

Here's the first one I did. It's a cookie game (of course Alfie the Alligator would need a cookie game)

And here's a train multiplication game I created for my train obsessed son to help him learn his multiplication tables.

If you try either game and find a bug, of if you have any comments or suggestions, I'd really appreciate it if you let me know.

I spent many hours trying to get my bird to walk. But my kids were much more impressed with this little animation of Bloo from Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends. I found instructions on how to create his walk cycle from Cold Hard Flash.

I have been wanting to learn how to use how to use Adobe Flash for quite some time now. So this month I've finally forced myself to sit down and start hacking away at it. It has a bit of a steep learning curve but it's a lot of fun. Most of the art I create is not vector based so for my first stab at getting something to more across the screen, I wanted to try and animate something that I created in Photoshop. So this is what I came up with.