fragMOTION

Most videos nowadays are greatly enhanced because technology has evolved so much that it's easily done with little knowledge. It's also the case for character design and animation, with a large variety of applications specially designed to put an intuitive environment at your disposal and thorough tools to create or edit animations, with fragMOTION being a suitable example.

In terms of design, the application is kept simple, with no shiny visual elements to distract you. Most of the space is taken up by the interactive preview section, while side panels provide quick access to functions and project content. You can also customize what and what not to be displayed for more comfort.

In case you're already working on a project and find the application useful, you might even be lucky enough for your file to be one of the accepted types. Amongst the supported formats you can find 3DS, B3D, FBX, MDL, OBJ and more. This comes in handy for developers or modders who want to edit or add new content.

On the other hand, the application comes equipped with a large variety of tools with which analysis is flawlessly done. You can enhance the grid with several elements to better measure or snap objects to it.

Camera controls have several presets to view from sides, top-down, or a 3D view. What's more, the object itself can have its details emphasized with bone configuration points and representations. All elements can be managed while an animation is running to get a glimpse of how the object reacts in different situations.

The application also manages to put a large variety of creation tools at your disposal. These are dedicated to animations, skeleton, model, textures and schema. You'll need to pay a little bit of attention if you want to find creation tools, because they are abundant but slightly difficult to locate.

Once you do, the application gives you the possibility to create 2D and 3D objects, such as various geometrical shapes, transform existing objects, manage bones, handle textures or modify sets of values to design either skeletal or vertex animations.

However, you need to constantly need to keep an eye on the preview section, because the properties panel is the only way to determine movement or add values, with a lot of experimenting to be done. You don't need to go all the way through, with various export options that allow you to save only specific project components or libraries, as well as the whole project.

Taking everything into consideration, we can say that fragMOTION is a simplistic, yet powerful 3D object and animation workstation packed with an abundance of viewing and editing tools. Support for multiple formats allows you to gather resources and compile into a single project, or manage and export only elements you see fit.