Flat Design Character Waving

Software has changed a lot since I started graphic design and it's been quite a few years since I tried animating characters. I wanted to start off simple by just having a character wave using only free software.

For this experiment, I designed my character above using Gravit Designer.

I knew for a fact I did not want to do frame by frame animation (Which leaves apps like GIMP out of the question). But Instead, use keyframe-based animation.
I first tried Google Web Designer then Edge Animate 1.5 which are not really designed for this kind of animation, they're more prone to animated web-based advertisements that do not loop. Edge Animate, however, is great for making games and apps but is not designed for specific character animations but more with DOM (Document Object Model) based interactions. Not to mention I cannot interact with paths of my SVG with these applications. You have to save each part of the character as a separate image in order to animate it using these applications which I did not want to do. (They're great apps btw and I do recommend them as a good animation tool but like I said it did not suite well with I how I wanted to animate)

I created this same animation using both Synfig Studio and Blender. I spent $1 for the Synfig Studio Training Course which really helped me understand how to use the application more. Blender I've been using for years so for me it was easier to just dive in and create the animation right away.

Both applications allow you to import a character you designed in a Vector editor like Gravit Designer or Inkscape and you can interact with the paths of the SVG you imported which is exactly how I wanted to animate. 

Encase you're wondering the animation you see above was created with Gravit Designer (for the character), Blender (for the animation), GIMP (to export the frames as a GIF).

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