I'm an industrial designer, using 3D CAD software to create my designs and Photoshop, Illustrator and inDesign, to create sketches & graphics, edit images, build presentations.

The problem is that most of these tools are +/- static. It's difficult to create & visualise interactions.

E.g. I would like to take a sketch/screenshot of the product I'm designing; sketch a hand; animate the hand so that it manipulates the product (e.g. push a button) and then animate what happens with the product (lights blinking, etc.); add comments, etc.

My main target is not to make very fancy presentation movies, but more "animated sketches", storyboards. Which software would you recomend to do this. I've explored the animation function of photoshop and that was ok, but a little too basic (e.g. I could make the hand move from A to B at a constant speed, but I couldn't make it follow a curve in a more dynamic way).


You would want to use after effects if you want to animate sketches and graphics in flexible ways.

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    While After Effects is likely a good option for his needs, could you expand the answer a bit more to explain how and/or why After Effects is an ideal choice. That would make it much more informative. – AJ Henderson Jul 5 '15 at 6:30

If you don't mind learning, Blender is a free open source project that you can use to create 3D animation, special effects, tracking, non linear video editing, compositing, etc... I haven't used After Effects as suggested before, but I'm sure Blender can accomplish the same and it's free.

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