try Pencil? Its a free app as far as I know. Pencil is one of those apps (and yes, it's free) which crops up a lot and yet never seems to attract a great deal of praise. It's still work-in-progress and many users have reported bugs or a tendency to freeze or crash. It's OK but never quite seems to ...

You told about tweaks... What do you mean? The voices can be modified someway? If you've installed it, you'll see that you can modify pitch and rate as well as loading a wide range of voices .... although only about 4 or 5 are actually much use for truly understandable speech. If you REALLY want to...

I use BALABOLKA. It's not great but it's the best free voice synth that I've ever found, and you can download a bucketload of additional voices for it which, when tweaked, are at least understandable. But for really good voice synthesis you'll have to pay.

http://www.cross-plus-a.com/balabolka.htm

Quite right - Pennaz91 (Riccardo) has a particular Artoonix style and has a range of animations on Youtube and now also posted into the Artoonix forum gallery. Over the last few months (early 2009) there has gradually been an increase in the numbers of people who have discovered Artoonix and are st...

Completely FREE http://www.blender.org If you try this, expect a very steep learning curve unless you're already familiar with 3D object creation. Without such knowledge, I'm not convinced Blender is ideal for actual movie making, but these links gives a few examples of possibilities: http://www.yo...

You may also want to check out antics 3D. No longer under development and the site is now offline. Version 4 was the last free, un-timebombed release but I do not know if it can still be found. I think an earlier version is available somewhere - but as I have v.4, I never needed to check. If you wa...

Watched all 5. Couldn't believe how bad the first 4 were - one began promisingly but then nosedived into the nasty stuff.

Absolutely no contest as far as I can see - voted you WAY above the others in the 1st two categories, and best of the 5 in the final category.

You're more than welcome. In fact - and with some irony - I've had a long break from ASpro due to illnesses in the family and other distractions, so I am only now about to start using it again ... thus my own tip will now be of use to me!

Hope the idea works for you.

Mike sent a reply to my email really fast (he wasn't avoiding me ..... If someone says "Yes, next month" and it it's more than that... people get furious and complain even more Vern made many good points in that original post of his in this thread. As well as AS, I use a couple of other a...

I also second the recommendation of the Williams book - but also look at the sheets based on the work of Preston Blair. Use this URL and look at the bottom of the page for links to idea sheets. http://minyos.its.rmit.edu.au/aim/a_notes/04_walkcycle_project.html#Walk_Return I used one of the illustra...

Can't help with that - I had no problems and there's a VERY active forum for queries.

Moviestorm is a Java-based program which may interest anyone who wants to get into 3D movie-making. The core program is free and fully functional. You can buy add-ons if you want to (at very reasonable costs). But do check the size of the initial download. There's plenty of time for a 3-course meal...

First - we've obviously got a Spammer in this thread - what have sneakers got to do with animation? As for 'Express Animator' .... Yes, I've tried it and registered it. Within very definite limits, it works moderately well. HOWEVER , the developer (I suspect there's only one) is VERY slow to releas...

A thought occurred to me this morning as I was reading through the tutorials that come with ASP. I know that (as yet) the official Help files have not been updated to include walkthroughs of the changes to layers and layer ordering as a result of the 5.6 update..... and that made me wonder which, if...

Oh well. Thanks for saving me the time.

Now I'll start trawling the forum for anyone who has posted some tips, walkthroughs or tutorials. Failing that, it will be DIY (or in my case DIM). I'm sure you can work that acronym out!