Animux

Animux Genesisrelease 16.3 · the animator's Linux

Animator freedom meets imagination.

83 tested programs for the whole film, from storyboard to render farm, on one free system. The tools of the animation industry, at your fingertips, whether you are preparing for a career in the studios or bringing your own vision to life.

⬇ Download Animux Read the guide
One ISO file · about 12 GB · built on Debian 12 · free to copy and share
The Animux Guide's page Animux at a glance, listing the 83 tested programs by department The Animux boot menu with the entry Install Animux to Disk
83 programs · one system

Every department of a film, ready on first boot

Drawing, 2D and 3D animation, rendering, sound, editing and delivery. Each program below is shown with its own start screen, recorded in Animux.

Blender 5.2 LTS splash screenBlender 5.2 LTS
Krita splash screenKrita
GIMP 3.2 splash screenGIMP 3.2
OpenToonz splash screenOpenToonz
Synfig Studio splash screenSynfig Studio
Inkscape welcome screenInkscape
Kdenlive splash screenKdenlive
Ardour splash screenArdour
LMMS splash screenLMMS
MuseScore 3 splash screenMuseScore
Hydrogen drum machine splash screenHydrogen
Gaffer node graph with the lighthouse sceneGaffer

All 83 programs at a glance →
Also inside: MakeHuman II and MPFB, Pencil2D, TupiTube, Stopmotion, MyPaint, Audacity, OpenShot, Cinelerra-GG, HandBrake, DJV, seven renderers (Cycles, EEVEE, POV-Ray, LuxCoreRender, appleseed, Mitsuba 3, pbrt-v4), Upscayl and offline AI tools such as Whisper subtitles.

Built by studios, given to everyone

The formats and tools of the big pipelines

The studios solved hard problems with their own tools, then released them as open source. Animux installs them, and its built-in guide explains each one with its sources.

The Animux Guide card for OpenUSD
Pixar · open source since 2016

OpenUSD

One shot, many departments: modelling, layout, animation and lighting each write their own layer of the same scene. Read by Blender, Houdini, Maya, Unreal and NVIDIA Omniverse.

The Animux Guide card for OpenEXR
Industrial Light & Magic · since 2003

OpenEXR

Keeps the real brightness of every pixel, so exposure can still change after the render, and stores render passes as layers for compositing.

Gaffer's node graph lighting the lighthouse scene
Image Engine

Gaffer

Node-based lighting and look development from a visual-effects studio: one light rig can serve every shot of a sequence, rendered with Cycles.

The Animux Guide card announcing OpenCue
Sony Pictures Imageworks · coming soon

OpenCue

The render manager Imageworks used on more than a hundred feature films, open source since 2019. Today Animux ships the Flamenco farm; OpenCue is coming soon.

Made in Animux

A short film, start to finish, on one system

Everything here was made inside Animux for the video tour: modelled and lit in Blender, painted in GIMP and Krita, rendered on the farm and cut in Kdenlive.

The lighthouse scene rendered on the Flamenco farm
Blender scene, rendered on the farm
Night version of the lighthouse painted in GIMP
Night plate painted in GIMP
2D character waving in front of the lighthouse
2D animation over the 3D render
Lighthouse title card in Kdenlive's monitor
Edited and subtitled in Kdenlive
Storyboard sketch of the lighthouse in Krita
Storyboard drawn in Krita
The same scene in six renderers
One scene, six renderers
Boot · install · render farm

From a USB stick to a room full of render nodes

The Animux boot menu: workstation, render farm master, render farm slave and Install to Disk

The Animux boot menu. Every role is one entry away.

  1. Start it from a USB stickWrite the ISO to a stick and boot. The live system runs without touching your disk.
  2. Install it from the boot menuChoose Install Animux to Disk, or keep it beside Windows with dual boot.
  3. Turn computers into a farmBoot one PC as Render Farm Master and the others as Render Farm Slave. They find each other on the network and share the work.
Flamenco's web page: a render job with its frames done by the farm's workers

Flamenco: a Blender job split into frames across the workers.

A render node's log as it joins the farm

A render node signs on to the farm by itself.

The Animux Guide

Written for animators who have never used Linux

Every step says what to click, with screenshots. The same guide is built into Animux and works offline, and AI assistants can read it too.

Try it safely

Run Animux in VirtualBox without touching your computer, or start it from a USB stick.

Getting started →

Make your first render

Step-by-step tutorials: Blender, Synfig, Pencil2D, Krita, Kdenlive and the command line.

Tutorials →

Work with AI assistants

MCP bridges let Claude Code or a local model work inside Blender, GIMP, Krita and Inkscape.

AI agents →
Download

Get Animux Genesis r16.3

One ISO file holds the whole system. Use it from a USB stick, in a virtual machine, or install it.

⬇ Download the ISO (12 GB) Try it in VirtualBox
Fileanimux-genesis64-deb_28.iso
Sizeabout 12 GB (save it to an exFAT or NTFS disk, not FAT32)
CheckSHA-256 on the download page
Processor64-bit with SSE4.2; AVX2 and 4+ cores recommended
Memory4 GB minimum, 16–32 GB recommended
Disk40 GB free, 100 GB+ on an SSD recommended
Built onDebian 12 with the Xfce desktop