Tools for Amateur Animators

The Persistence of Vision Ray-tracer (POV-Ray)
POV-Ray is a freeware 3d renderer that has been around since the late 90's. I first started working with it back in 1997, and produced my first animation in 1998 for the April-July round of the Internet Ray Tracing Competition. At the time I was living paycheck-to-paycheck and so I barely had enough money for the computer I was using, which meant no money for commerical modeling and animation tools, and because POV-Ray is free to download and use this was a god-send.
For most users the chief weakness of POV-Ray is that it does not come with a modeler; it is strictly a rendering package that uses script files to describe the scene content. The scene description language is capable of describing any scenery that the user could want, but for many objects of interest a hand-edited scripting language is simply not practical. There have been efforts to create modeling applications for POV-Ray, but for the most part they don't have all the features that are desired for general-purpose animation work.
ffmpeg
ffmpeg is a freeware video encoder that has a bit of a learning curve, but delivers results that are more than good enough for amateur work. If you need better quality than ffmpeg delivers, you need to be getting paid for what you're doing.
At some point I'll post a short tutorial on how to use it.
Sound
At this point I haven't done any sound work for my animations, so I'm not knowledgeable about any tools for that.

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