Expert: Andre Hickman - 9/4/2007

Question
Hi,

I am a teacher in an international school in India and we were looking for animated programmes for our IGCSE syllabus, subject wise and topic wise. The idea is to reinforce the learnt material and make the learning fun and the experience interesting .

Answer
A number of schools use Flash for introducing animation.  It is really 2D cell-type animation, but it is a good intro, and is used as a multi-media staple.  For 3D animation and character animation, there is only one software that I would recommend as an intro software...POSER.  It will give students the ability to understand character motion, camera animation, texturing (to a degree), keyframes, and lighting, without getting real deep into modelling or rigging characters.

Here is a link:
http://www.e-frontier.com/go/poser

Along the same lines, for scenescapes, you may want to take a look at VUE.  It is from the same company, and they do have bundle packages for the two softwares (only $299, whereas Poser is $249 by itself).

TRUST ME, This is the way to go for introductory learning...

Cheers,
Andre'