Top three materials for traditional animation
- These pencils are great for doing your initial sketches, because they're just the right shade of pale blue that they tend not to show up on copies when you're transferring your work from paper to clear cels. And regular pencils too.
- Your best bet is to buy copy paper with three holes punched down the side--by the ream, or by the case. One second of animation will take you anywhere from 30 to 100 sheets of paper, allowing for duplicates for retracing and for mistakes, so you'll need quite a bit of paper. 20-lb copy paper is heavy enough to make a good copy, but light enough that you can see through several layers of it with a light table on beneath it.
- Your light table has two primary purposes: to retrace your sketched frames, and to sketch new frames as in-betweens. With this you can light your artwork from below to make it transparent enough to see through for reference
Programs for 3d animation
- Autodesk Maya
- Houdini
- LightWave
Digital 2d animation programs
- Anime Studio Pro
- Toon Boom Studio
- Scratch (web program)
Stop motion animation
Anything can be used to make a stop motion animation: toys, dolls, teddy bears and even coke cans.