Vectorian Giotto is a simple but powerful flash animation software that allows you to create professional quality Flash animations for websites and other projects without coding. Users who are already familiar with Adobe Flash will immediately find themselves at ease, for the user interface is identical to that of Adobe Flash. For the new user, there is a gentle learning curve that can be easily overcome with a few minutes (or hours) of dedication.
In fact, Vectorian Giotto is created exactly for this kind of users. This free software comes packed with more than 50 customizable effects that can be applied to both shapes and text. There are over a 100 effect presets that display the different ways in which the effects can be adjusted. There is also a pretty detailed manual and numerous tutorials to guide you through the steps for creating your first Flash animation.
Unlike LiveSwif, which I called the “poor man’s Adobe Flash”, Vectorian Giotto has a set of powerful drawing tools, sophisticated shape morphing, stunning built-in effects, sound and scripting support. In addition, it supports layers and gradient fills as well as intersection, union and difference operations on objects. You can set key animation parameters as dimensions, background color and frame rate. Animation is based on simple motion tween concept: set-up start and end look of objects and Giotto does the rest by itself. You can preview your animation inside Vectorian Giotto without launching a browser or external player.
Features:
- Create complex vector illustrations in Giotto, anything from simple shapes to custom ones like polygon, star, or rounded rectangle. Transform vector objects in any imaginable way. Use bitmap filters like blur, drop shadow, glow, and all blend modes. Automatically merge objects when drawing shapes with the same brush.
- Organize all objects in the Library, create symbols like Movie Clips and Buttons for multiple use. Add text fields, with font kerning and paragraph alignment.
- Animate objects with motion tweens and shape tweens. Add sound to movies and create advanced interactivity.
- Giotto comes packed with more than 50 great effects that can be applied to both shapes and text. All effects are fully and easily customizable through the effect editor, and the results are immediately visible on the screen for you to play and explore.
- There are more than 100 effect presets, to show the new user the different ways the effects can be adjusted.
- Giotto’s built-in editor for color palettes uses special algorithms based on human perception of colors, rather then traditional mathematical models which produce poor results. Once you select the base color of your project, you would have countless options to create palettes using many various matching algorithms.
- Add background music or transitional sound effects to your movies, in MP3 or WAV format. Giotto even lets you compress your sound and change the compression of existing MP3 files, if you need to decrease the bandwidth needed to send your sound to the user.
- Giotto has full support for ActionScript 2. ActionScript 3 is not yet supported.
- Full support for Flash 8 blends and filters.
Great review of Vectorian Giotto. It's definitely a great software for anyone who wants to create their own Flash animations. Very easy to use and very easy to learn. Not to mention, it's free.
Here's another really good post on V.G.- http://www.softwarecrew.com/2011/05/featured-download-vectorian-giotto/
Best!
Great review of Vectorian Giotto.
So thus far this program has been great, easy to learn and work with. Others have reported crashes, I've not had too many but I'd advise to save often just in case.
I'm having trouble with the size of the final animation; it is showing more that what is over the stage when I export the flash file, everything in fact. Not sure how to fix that.
Other than those things I'd say it could be an Adobe rival.
Awesome software find, thanks!