Best Tools for Motion Designers and Animators in 2024

No more keyframes and long hours of animating - can you imagine creating a design with intuitive and simple, yet powerful tools that untie your hands for any task? Here they come!

Cavalry

Imagine animation made without 3-d party plugins? Discover the Cavalry for yourself!

Launched in 2019 as a start-up based in Manchester, Cavalry is becoming a powerful 2D animation software, and, as its founders say,"a secret weapon for some of the world's best design studios”.

Highly customizable and quick to produce, Cavalry allows you to design 2D animation in real-time for advertising, mobile, data visualization, web, broadcast, UI, generative art, experiential, games and more.

"We felt the industry was crying out for a tool that was real-time and procedural” say the founders, so the tool basically allows you to mix procedural workflows and traditional techniques to gain the result in easy and playful way.

The features inside leave no place to collect an endless amount of After Effects plugins - here you’ll get a whole bunch of customization properties, such as rig control, text animation, duplicator, magic easing, rubber hose, data import, Lottie export, and much, much more.

Cavalry has already earned its name and is trusted by giants like Amazon, Google, Pentagram, Dumbar, and Buck.

If you want to try it out - here’s good news for you! Cavalry has a Starter option, which allows you to get acquainted with the tool and use most of its features. It’s free forever, provides real-time feedback, and requires no credit card!

For advanced settings, use the Professional option - it’s just £16/mo and includes such features as dynamic rendering, audio export, and more. Totally worth it!

https://cavalry.scenegroup.co/

Spline

Now, let’s move to the innovative real-time tool that will take your 3D animations to the next level - Spline!

As a Latin American start-up, Spline was founded in 2020 by Alejandro Leon and raised seed funding to provide designers, developers, and creators globally with an innovative 3D design platform. We’re happy it did!

“3D design has been historically complex and inaccessible for designers. Spline aims to fix that”, says its founder. The tool developed quickly and kept on adding new breathtaking features; it’s already expanded to serve tens of thousands of monthly users, solely across the U.S.

Spline allows you to create and animate 3D objects, edit materials, add interactivity, and control the outcome of your 3d design work. This 3D tool will perfectly suit your workflow if you’re frequently designing mockups, 3D stills and animations, landings or anything else in 3D.

You’ll find much-needed features, such as 3D modeling, animation, material layers, 3D sculpting, game and physics controls, and real-time collaboration. You can create and export team projects, code, templates and make pretty much everything in real time.

Spline is already used and trusted by Amazon, Google, Shopify, Meta, Scale and others. Users also keep mentioning that the interface is intuitive enough to use without onboarding tutorials and reminds Figma!

The tool also provides a free basic version for your personal use to get acquainted with Spline and create an unlimited number of projects. The Super version of Spline costs $24/mo and unlocks new features, such as sound and material libraries, AI texture generation and more.

https://spline.design

Womp

Another 3D tool you get to know about is Womp. Beginner-friendly and simple to use, Womp provides a bunch of tools for your 3D projects, so you can easily gain professional results!

Being a 3D startup from Brooklyn, Womp raised funds to help designers worldwide.“I discovered the barriers that currently existed: the software was difficult to use, expensive and resource-heavy in terms of computing power. So, I set out to uncover what people would need to be able to interact with 3D software more intuitively, using artificial intelligence” says the Womp founder, Gabriela Trueba.

Here you can not just create a 3D model from scratch but use and customize thousands of assets made by other editors. To quickly get into modeling with Womp, the tool provides funny mini-games for beginners to learn the basics and start using the tool.

Womp is web-based and runs on cloud servers, so you won’t need a high-end computer to create your models.

The free version of this tool gives you access to basic materials, such as glass, metal, and shiny. You can export models in .stl and .obj in up to 4K and remix community creations. The Pro version costs $9.99/mo and additionally allows you to apply community super materials, export 3D meshes, upload your own typefaces and more!

https://womp.com/index

Fable

Fable is a new, AI-powered tool for design and animation. The company spent on Fable 3+ years and managed to raise a total funding of $22.4M and implement new innovative features.

The tool allows you to generate and customize objects with precision prompts and influence sliders, use animation to guide generations, and in overall create and animate 2D and 3D graphics from scratch.“We’re at a unique moment in time where cloud-based software is proving the future of creative work is not only happening in a browser, but is thriving” say founders.

The free version of this tool allows you to create projects up to 30 seconds. The Pro version costs $12/mo and also has a limit of overall 5 minutes of projects. Additionally, you can use custom fonts and templates, export videos in 4K.

https://www.fable.app/pricing

To Sum Up

The motion design industry is undergoing a rapid transformation propelled by advancements in AI and real-time web-based services. With these technologies, creators no longer need to rely solely on traditional tools like After Effects or spend years learning animation and motion design techniques. Instead, AI-powered tools and real-time platforms allow anyone with an idea to bring it to life quickly and efficiently. Now all roads to creativity are opened!