You have a thirty-second animation to make.
Before you can make it, the tool wants three things from you. A card on file. A machine with a discrete GPU. And about two weeks of tutorials, because the interface assumes you already know what a node graph is.
Most people give up somewhere in that list. Not because the work is hard, but because the cost of finding out whether they can do it is too high.
Morphable 26.1 is the first release, and it asks for none of the three.
Download it, open it, and drag a shape onto the canvas. Drag it somewhere else. That is an animation. Nothing to sign up for, nothing uploaded anywhere, and no account exists to make.
What you can put on a canvas
Nine kinds of object: rectangles, circles, text, images, video, audio, SVG artwork, vector shapes you draw yourself, and groups.
Groups are real objects rather than a label. Select one, move it, rotate it, animate it, and everything inside comes along. Nest them eight deep if the piece calls for it.
The pen tool draws proper vector shapes with bézier handles on every point, and you edit those points directly on the canvas rather than in a dialogue box. Import an SVG and you can do the same thing to it: turn someone else's artwork into shapes you can reshape point by point.
Text ships with the controls a design tool ought to have, and typefaces from Thin to Black are bundled, so it works with the wifi off.
Animation
There are 22 things you can animate. Position, size, rotation, color, gradients, outlines, shadows, corner radius, skew, three kinds of blur, visibility, volume, shape morphing, and video freeze.
Put two animations on the same object and the second starts where the first finished. You do not wire that up. It just happens, so a move followed by a colour change composes the way you would expect it to.
Movement can follow a path you draw. A straight line, a series of waypoints, a curve you drag around on the canvas, or the outline of any shape already in the scene.
That last one is worth a sentence of its own. The animation stores a reference to the shape, not a copy of it. Reshape the guide and everything travelling along it moves too, which turns a tedious round of manual adjustment into dragging one point.
Two dials control how something travels. Speed sets how far along the path it gets in the time you give it. Momentum decides whether it slows through tight bends and makes the time up on the straights, so a moving object behaves like it has weight instead of gliding at a constant rate.
There are 25 ready-made motion styles. If none of them is the one in your head, draw the curve yourself in the Bezier editor, name it, and it is waiting for you in every project after that.
Text Animations
Pick the unit: a character, a word, a line, or the whole block. Pick whether it enters or leaves, which direction it comes from, and which end goes first.
Then shape it. How far it travels in. How much it springs past its resting place before settling. How much the letters overlap each other on the way, from all-at-once to strictly one-at-a-time. And what colour it fades in from before it settles on its own.
That is a lot of headline treatments out of one panel, and none of them require an expression.
Tilt things in 3D
Grab the orbit rings on the canvas and turn an object on any axis.
This is real perspective, not a squash. A square tilted about its horizontal axis draws as a trapezoid with the near edge longer than the far one, which is the whole difference between something that looks three-dimensional and something that looks like it got scaled down vertically.
Fills, gradients, strokes, rounded corners, images, video, text and shadows all foreshorten correctly, because the perspective is applied after the object is drawn rather than being faked separately for each type.
Design Mode
There is also a Design mode, which is a small thing that turns out to matter. Switch to it and animation stops moving your objects around while you are trying to work on how they look. You get the piece at rest, so you can adjust the design before deciding how it moves.
And every panel docks wherever you drag it. Beside, above, below, into a tab group, or against the window edge as a full-height sidebar. The arrangement is still there next time you open the app.
Export, with nothing held back
MP4, WebM, or MOV. Any resolution, including 4K and past it.
No watermark. No resolution cap. No limit on how many exports you get.
Vectors are redrawn at the size you export rather than stretched up to it, so a composition you built at 1080p is genuinely sharp at 4K instead of being a bigger blurry version of itself.
Audio is mixed for you. Every clip gets lined up against the picture, volume changes are followed as a gain envelope, and it all arrives in the finished file. FFmpeg copies the video stream rather than re-encoding it, so the picture that comes out is the picture that went in.
Change your mind halfway through and cancel. It stops there and then, and never leaves you a half-written file that looks finished.
What the timeline shows is what you get
Preview, scrubbing and export all run the same evaluation.
That means a slow laptop produces a file identical to a fast workstation's. It just takes longer getting there. Frame for frame, what you saw at a given moment on the timeline is what lands in the video.
A few other things that stay out of your way:
Undo covers everything, and dragging a slider counts as one step to undo rather than forty.
Saves finish completely before they replace the old file, so a crash or a flat battery cannot leave you with a broken project.
If a video or image has been moved or deleted, the object stays where you put it with a placeholder in its place, and Morphable tells you exactly which files are missing instead of leaving a hole.
Objects snap to each other's edges and centres as you drag, with guides showing what they lined up against.
Set an object's pivot point once and everything you animate afterwards turns around it.
Double-click a
.mrpfile to open it straight in the editor, on Windows, macOS and Linux.
Nothing leaves your machine
Decoding, rendering and encoding all happen on your hardware. There is no telemetry, no analytics, no server, and no account.
The single outbound request is an optional update check, and you can switch that off.
If this project disappears tomorrow, your work does not go with it. Projects are JSON in a documented container, so anything can read one:
tail -c +7 project.mrp | base64 -d | python -c \
"import sys,zlib;print(zlib.decompress(sys.stdin.buffer.read()).decode())"What it costs
The community edition is free under the GPL, and stays that way.
Morphable Pro, when it arrives, is a perpetual licence for one major version rather than a subscription. Stop buying and you keep the version you bought and everything you made with it. Each release's Pro features are staged to move into the community edition afterwards, so what Pro buys is early access, not permanent exclusivity.
The reasoning is written out in full in the roadmap, including the parts that are an argument rather than a promise.
Next
26.2 brings reusable components, transition animations, animation presets, spline objects with draw-on animation, chromakey, local and Google Fonts, Figma import and export, and macOS and Linux verified on the platforms themselves rather than by declaration.
26.3 opens the project to outside contributions.
Try it
This is a first release from one developer, and the useful thing you can do is make something real with it and tell me where it breaks. Odd codecs, huge files, footage straight off a phone, and anything at all on macOS or Linux are the places a bug report is worth most.