Pencil Animation and Cartoon Software for Windows

[javajolt]

If you are an animation lover and want to do get started with something very simple, then this animation application called Pencil is for you. With the advancements in the development tools, animation is now a fairly simple and standardized task. Visual effects, special effects and 3D graphics application are available from many vendors, but they require some serious skills and costs pretty high.
 
Pencil animation software
 
Pencil is a simple, plain and easy to use application with bunch of options under the hood. In fact I should be saying, it is very quick to get started with it any time even though, you may not have any experience with any drawings and effects software before.



Pencil animation tools
 
Pencil has many tools that can assist you making drawings and filling colors. They are:
 
 • Paint Brush

 • Polyline

 • Eraser

 • Modify Curve

 • Select Tool

 • Clear Button

 • Pen Tool

 • Color Picker

 • Paint Bucket

 • Move Tool

 • Zoom Canvas
 
Pencil animation features

Pencil, though a small application, has quite a few features that can come handy at times.
 
 • Layers

 • Drawing

 • Bitmap drawing

 • Vector drawing

 • Zoom and rotation

 • Animating

 • Adjusting keys

 • Importing images

 • Cameras

 • Sound
 
Under the Time Line tab it is possible to add layers such as a Bitmap Layer, Vector Layer, Sound Layer and Camera Layer. As it’s an animation application you can also add and remove KeyFrames.
 
Animation
 
Pencil allows you to create cartoons, animate images and add audio. Animation as usual, is done by adding multiple images or frames and then playing the sequence. The playing speed is set using the frame per second (fps) speed. A camera layer lets you define a particular view, with a certain aspect ratio, within your unlimited canvas. What’s more, you can define a view for each key of the camera track, and the view is linearly interpolated between the keys.
 
Pencil application is a portable application of size 5 MB and doesn’t require installation. It has a well documented user’s manual that can teach all the basics and the advance features of the application. You can have a look at the user manual here
 
You can download the Pencil application here.