I was wondering if there are any tools out there that are made specifically for character animation? As a one man team, I don’t expect my game to look fantastic, so I don’t need extremely powerful tools like Blender. I just need something that lets me make a skeletal structure, pose it, make key frames, and export it into a format Unity can use. I was trying Animeeple and found that the actual posing tools are really sub par (You can’t directly rotate the knee or elbow). I was wondering if anyone could provide me with such a tool.
tl;dr: Do you know of a character animation tool that has a low start up time investment (I won’t have to read hours of tutorials until it decides to tell me to right click to rotate a joint.)?
i haven´t see a free tool for that, but you can try mixamo :
http://www.mixamo.com/c/help/workflows_unity
there is another paid tool from autodesk, i don´t remember the name… there was a thread here naming it… …
i´m interested in this too…
But isn’t Mixamo only premade animations? And while I’m not unwilling to spend some coin, isn’t all of Autodesk’s software ridiculously expensive?
bump wrong post 
PD:I really recommend you blender, it may look scary at first, but just with some youtube tutorials on the new blender version, and you be making your own caracters with, its bones or ameature, and animations cycles, just learn how to move the stuff, and fallow some tutorials on youtube in a day or two you will have been doing all that stuff, Thats what I did
PD: One time I was like yourself looking for a simple animation program, but telling your right, I was all a full week looking for one, and at the end found nonething, tried C4D, found it to hard, so I selted for a free blender program, I remembered the ugly GUI of the 49 version, but downloaded the new 56-57 version and loved it! its really user friendly know! but still i was scared, it was still a advance hard to learn program, but after some 2 or 3 youtube videos, as above loved blender for its so easy to use!
Then, the program’s Autodesk for character animation MotionBuilder is a professional, with it you have control over everything related to the characters.
Autodesk | 3D Design, Engineering & Construction Software free trial
Maybe a full list of animation tools should pinned? Because many questions keep getting asked time and time again!!!