If you want to animate a basic drawing, something like Animated Drawings might be enough. But if you're looking for more complex software, the only answer is to accumulate hours of practice with a full-featured tool. Cascadeur stands out as an excellent candidate, not only because of its advanced profile and the large number of available tutorials, but also because of a quite flexible trial.
By now, you've reached the point where you want to animate something. Choosing the right tool isn't easy because of the amount of time you'll need to invest in it. If the budget is limited, you can always follow the Blender route, but you'll have to consume a lot of material to absorb its features. However, there are other animation options that are friendlier in the short term. One of them is Cascadeur, which focuses mainly on humanoids and similar characters.
How to animate characters with Cascadeur
After installing the software and creating an account (or alternatively, logging in with alternative credentials), my recommendation is to follow the official tutorial that will help you create your first animated character in five minutes. This video covers opening a pre-designed model, basic camera controls (essentially a combination of the Alt key and mouse buttons), node manipulation, injecting keys into the timeline, and using interpolation to generate all the intermediate motion.
At the same time, the tutorial explains how to introduce physics with the Auto Physics command, along with other corrections to your model. Unfortunately, this content is in English, but it's quite easy to follow, even with the inevitable differences in the interface: the video was published in July 2021, and the latest build of Cascadeur is from December 2022.
Cascadeur has compatibility with a large number of programs, including the aforementioned Blender, Maya, 3ds Max, and Unreal Engine, so enthusiasts and professionals alike can combine multiple resources. To finish, the program has a basic and free mode that limits export to 300 frames and 120 joints. Commercial use is allowed as long as earnings do not exceed $100,000 annually. Any other professional use requires a Pro subscription, with an annual price of $300.
Official site and download: Click here
