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Speaking of ink and paint, once you have traced over - or cleaned up - your scanned images (or drew your own inside ToonBoom Studio with a graphics tablet), and are satisfied with the motions, it is time to paint your cels. One thing I really like about ToonBoom Studio is the ability to create a color model for characters or scenes. For example, let’s say you are animating a lumberjack and you give him a brown hat, red checked shirt, blue pants, and tan skin. In ToonBoom Studio, you would create a palette for the character and assign colors that are associated with those items. If the lumberjack goes outside at night the colors would not be the same as the daylight palette. By duplicate the palette and changing the colors to darker shades, two color models are created in a short amount of time. To paint the cels, simply highlight the color in the palette and use the paint bucket to fill in the appropriate area. ToonBoom Studio also includes gradient and transparency settings to create subtle shifts in shading or to create highlights on the subject.
Seems pretty simple, you can do the same thing in almost any 2D graphics program, but how many will let you change a whole series of frames instantaneously? In the lumberjack example, let’s say you have drawn and colored 300 frames, and the client comes in and says the color of the pants is all wrong and it needs to be purple (the client is always right). With ToonBoom Studio, all you have to do change the color in the palette and it instantly changes all of the areas in all of the cels that have that particular color. Very handy. [an error occurred while processing this directive] One other major plus for this program is the Sound Editor. With it, you can import a sound file, make some simple edits, and most powerful of all, automatically generate a phoneme track for you. This allows you to draw your phonemes to match the appropriate mouth shapes, and then have ToonBoom Studio place them into the animation for you. What’s more, since phonemes are somewhat universal, you can use the Sound Editor for any language. Again, this may sound like a cheap way to animate, but it is a huge timesaver and does produce very usable results.
Once all of the animated elements are complete, it is time to lay everything out in the Scene planning part of ToonBoom Studio. While similar to a multiplane camera, Scene planning allows you to position all of the elements in 3D space, create moving camera effects, and use a peg system to parent various layers to one another and move them as a group through a scene. At first it may seem like a lot to take in, but coming from a 3D background, a few moments is all it took for me to get everything working. I used ToonBoom Studio on my Sony VAIO laptop, and also ran the 30 day demo version on my Mac OS X machine. The functionality and ease of use is the same on both platforms, but for some reason I felt more comfortable using it on the Mac.
When everything has been laid out accordingly, all you have to do is export the animation. I mentioned earlier that ToonBoom Studio is excellent for Flash creation, but you can also export your animation in QuickTime format. An exported QuickTime file can easily be imported into an editing application such as Apple’s Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere, or Media100 i. The latest version of ToonBoom Studio allows export to iMovie for OS X users, and as of a few days ago, ToonBoom Studio also allows you export directly into Macromedia’s Flash MX with the TBSi plug-in.
Unfortunately you cannot export an alpha channel with the animation if you plan on doing any compositing, but if the animation background were set to pure white, it would be easy enough to pull a luma matte. Also, the maximum frame size for export is 640x480. While these may seem like disadvantages, remember that ToonBoom Studio is designed with the website animator in mind and not necessarily the video person. If it were, then why would there be a package like USAnimation?
ToonBoom Studio definitely has a place in animation houses that are creating content for the web and multimedia presentations. For $349.00 it is worth the asking price. ToonBoom Studio is a fun application, but drawing every single frame can get a little labor intensive for some, and while ToonBoom Studio does create Flash animations, if you want to add interactivity, you’ll need the full Flash package. Those who have a traditional animation background or experience using higher end animation programs will have not trouble using ToonBoom Studio to create the next action packed webisode of their cartoon hero. I give ToonBoom Studio a Strong Buy Recommendation.
If you’d like to try before you buy, be sure to visit the ToonBoom Studio site to download the fully functioning 30 day demo for either the Mac OS X or Windows platform.
Stephen Schleicher is the producer for Digital WebCast and Digital Animators. You can reach him at stephens@digitalmedianet.com
Source: Digital Media Online, Inc.
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