Animation software make ease to a novice to expert animator to make animations. The features are very flexible and user-friendly for animator. The online help guides to the user at any point of time while operating the software. The software should run in a specified computer machine. There are separate software for 2 dimensional (2D) animations and 3 dimensional (3D) animations. There are lots of animation software are available in market. Many open source animation software are widely published and available for a trial use for certain period. If a user likes it for further use can purchase from the builder.

2D Animation Software Features:

Creating Content feature offers intuitive and easy-to-use to animators for your story. In addition to onion-skinning features, a customizable grid and auto gap-closing helps to the animators. Automated lip-sync saves time for creative minds that offers fully automated lip-syncing capabilities.

Building a template Library for organizing, saving and re-using all of your assets and animations with template library is easy to use and can contain all kinds of media files like movies, photo collections, artwork from leading software packages including SWF, AI, PDF, JPEG, PSD, TGA and GIF file formats.

Animating Elements make the animation process as easy as 1-2-3. The transform tool allows the user to animate motion, scaling, rotation and skewing using automatic key frame insertion into the time line.

Scene Layout can be taken only seconds to populate a scene with templates by using drag-and-drop and scene planning tools. Create Camera Moves in a virtual 3D environment to set the action. Drop Shadow feature adds astonishing special effects to scene. Create convincing animation special effects with ease no matter how complicated the animations are.

Publish or compiling creates high quality animation for the Web, PDAs, iPods, cell phones, TV, HDTV and including SWF, AVI, QuickTime, DV Streams, image sequences and more.

Standard Computer System Requirements from 2D Animation software:

For Macintosh the specification are Power Macintosh G5, G4 (Minimum), or Intel? CoreTM processors Mac OS X v10.4.7, 512 MB Ram (or bigger), 256 MB (or more), 120 MB of available hard disk space, 24-bit color display, with 64 MB (Recommended)or 8 MB (Minimum) video RAM, capable of 1024x768 resolution.

For PC System specifications are 800 MHz Intel Pentium III processor (Minimum) with Microsoft Windows XP or 2000, 512 MB Ram (Recommended), 256 MB (or more), 120 MB of available hard disk space, 24-bit color display with 32 MB Video RAM or more, Capable of 1024x768 Resolution.

3D Animation Software Features:

3D Modeler, TrueType font support, Import and modify file formats, Export .3DS files, Built in 3D Object browser, Jointed character editor, Morph targets, Renderer for high quality, production quality images, Create 3D scenes and animations and output .AVI movie files, .JPG and .BMP images, Supports textures, bump maps, soft shadows, spotlights, fog, and much more, Texture support for .BMP, .GIF, and .JPG format files, Scripting language etc.

Standard Computer System Requirements from 3D Animation software:

Windows NT4, Win95, Win98, WinSE, Win2K, or WinXP, OpenGL accelerated graphics card with full ICD support, (ala GeForce), 64 MB memory, 128MB recommended, or 256MB if you use WinXP, 300 MHz Pentium, 5MB disk space.

Some popular animation software:

Ulead Animation, Ulead GIF Animator 5, CoffeeCup Animation Software, CoffeeCup GIF Animator, CoffeeCup Firestarter, Firestarter, Reallusion Animation Software, Effect3D Studio, 3D Max, Toonboom Studio, Macromedia Flash.