Looking for free stop motion animation software? If so, check out Heron Animation.
Entirely free to download and use, Heron Animation works like other stop motion apps: it takes a series of pictures from a connected camera and then assembles each shot into a motion animation you can export as a video file.
The app is written in web technologies and pitches itself as ‘perfect for beginners and more experienced animators alike’.
That sort of balance is notoriously hard to achieve.
Heron Animation features include:
- Connect to a webcam
- Onion skin w/ difference mode
- Playback animation at any FPS
- Preview your animation at any time
- Short play (play the last few last frames)
- Delete and move the frames
- Duplicate frames
- Export video as .MP4, .MOV, .AVI
The app is also backed up with a decent set of keyboard shortcuts. These make it easy to control and monitor recording with just your Bluetooth keyboard in your lap as you painstakingly reposition your subject matter.
(Onion skinning, in case you’re not familiar with the phrase, is a feature whereby the previous image is overlain to help you ‘position your objects more accurately’. It’s a feature commonly found in stop motion apps, including the popular qStopMotion.)
Is it the best free stop motion software? That’s for you to decide. It’s early days for the app. It also doesn’t appear to be open-source, but it is free to download and use.
Download Heron Animation
When my eyes first read the e-mail subject “heron animation” my immediate thought was “Ah, someone’s made an animated Ubuntu 8.04 wallpaper!”
Not the case, sadly – though I can’t say I’m disappointed to learn what it was actually about.
I’ve tried doing some stop motion animation in the past and it is a time-intensive process. Any app, tool or script able to speed things up (pun intended) is welcome by me (I lack patience).
That said, there is one glaring feature omission here: support for DSLR cameras.
As of now Heron Animation only works with webcams. And a number of Linux users have experienced issues getting this app to detect their webcam accurately – but webcam woes aren’t exactly rare on Linux, it has to be said.
Fancy trying it out? Heron Animation is a free download and is available for Windows, Mac and Linux. You can grab it from the application’s official website.
At the time of writing the Linux builds have a misconfigured .desktop file. To run the app you’ll need to drag the ‘Heron Animator’ binary in to the Terminal and hit enter. It should, after a brief pause load up.
As Heron Animation is under active development you should expect to encounter bugs, missing features and or crashes.
If you use Heron Animation to make something natty, do share a link in the comments below!
Images brick-a-brack.com