Boats Animator

Other than a basic camera, you don’t need a lot of specialized equipment of even experience to create a good stop-motion animation, which is why this technique is still quite popular nowadays.
Boats Animator is an open-source app that makes it even easier to capture frames for your animations. It offers some interesting features, including onion skinning, but several others have not yet been fully implemented.

Easy-to-use frame capture tool for stop-motion animations

From the get-go, you will see that Boats Animator is a very user-friendly piece of software. Any connected recording device should be recognized automatically, and you can see the content to be captured in the preview area.
After capturing a frame, you can move the objects a small amount, save the next still, and so on. The process is very straightforward, and all the images will be exported to a specified folder in the PNG format.

Still in active development, so some features are not yet available

It is worth mentioning that Boats Animator supports onion skinning, which means it will display a translucent version of the last image to be captured, with the aim of making it easier to position objects in the frame. You can even customize the translucency value.
However, a lot of other features have not been implemented, such as the ability to load and save projects, change the default camera or select a different resolution.

Easy-to-use, open-source frame capture tool

While Boats Animator cannot help you turn the captured images into videos, there are plenty of other tools that can be used for this purpose. If all you need is a quick and simple way to record stills for your animations, this application can certainly get the job done.
On the whole, this program looks very promising, and we were mostly impressed by its intuitive, novice-friendly design. Once the missing features are implemented, this will be an excellent alternative to overly complex or expensive stop-motion animation tools.