Toon Boom is the worldwide leader in 2D animation software. Toon Boom Studio
is basically the "Final Cut Pro" or "Adobe Premiers" of animation. As you can
imagine I was very enthusiastic when the opportunity arose to review the
software. I had heard about Toon Boom animation software over a year ago and
had seen the impressive galleries of cartoons made with the software, but had
never touched the program itself. If you've never seen what you can do with
the Toon Boom Studio I would suggest checking out some of the awesome things
you can do with Toon Boom Studio as well as other products that Toon Boom
makes. Just follow this Link to Toon Boom.com and take a tour of one of their
amazing pieces of software.
Back to the review
As I stated about, this was my first encounter with the Toon Boom Studio. I
have had plenty of experience with Flash and other timeline based software, so
I expected my experience with Toon Boom Studio to be a smooth transition. I
was pretty wrong, but don't let my initial reaction spoil this awesome
software.
Installation was quick. I did hit one glitch when I tried to run it the first
time. Toon Boom Studio 4 requires Quick Time to run. Normally that wouldn't
have been an issue, but I've just installed a fresh version of XP on my
machine and hadn't tracked down all the extra little programs that seem to bog
machines down. In short I had to install Quicktime before I could start, but
rather than going through Apple.com to download Quicktime, I went to
Download.com and was able to grab Quicktime without having to install iTunes.
That saved me a little headache and some extra RAM.
Upon opening Toon Boom Studio you get a pretty standard dialogue that lets you
specify the dimensions of your project.
The tool bar on the left is pretty easy to navigate through. You have a
selection tool, a brush tool, a paint tool, eraser, zoom, rotation tool,
scale, and then a motion path tool that is definitely an odd ball of the
bunch. The top tool bar has the regular buttons for saving, pasting, cuting
etc, then next to it are controls for playing your animations. Then beside
that are views for grids, and next to that are the options for onion skinning.
Next to those tools are tools for Motion called Pegs, then at the end are
drop downs for Camera, Scenes and Workspaces.
On the right side of the screen are palletes for color, properties, libraries
of saved animations and below that are palletes for your Pen, Text and Cells.
The bottom of the screen houses your layers and elements, and those are
connected to your timeline. There are three tabs behind the timeline. One
for Exposure sheet and the other for Function Editor.
Getting Started
It is really easy to get started drawing and adding art to your project. You
have a big window for your animation and easy access to your tools. I would
really suggest using a Wacom Tablet for ease of drawing, but I'm sure anyone
considering this program would have one. So it is really easy to draw. I had
my first drawing finished in seconds, unfortunately that is where I hit the
wall. The time line in TBS (Toon Boom Studio) is very different from any
timeline I've ever used in the past. Tweening is as available as it is in
Flash, and animating is primarily accomplished through the Exposure Sheet tab
rather than the timeline. The timeline is more for placing elements and clips
rather than for actual animation. So I did what any normal user who's lost
does; I looked for a tutorial.
Getting Started Again (now with Tutorial)
Lucky for me Toon Boom.com is full of tutorials to help their users out. I
downloaded the first one (The quick start guide) that walks you through making
an animation of a guy tiptoeing through a house while a ghost swoops down
through the scene. This first tutorial is actually like 10 lessons and goes
through the ins and outs of the program. The tutorial is pretty easy to
follow and it takes you through the steps required to make animations in the
program. I'm not going to go to much farther into the tutorial I took, but I
will state that you should not expect to fly through it. It will take a few
hours and you probably will have to repeat sections of it before you get the
knack of the program.
Program Features
TBS is very feature rich. The coolest things that make TBS stand out from
Flash and other programs are its peg system, its 3D layouts, its quick lip
sync feature and its library tools for quick and easy importing of saved
templates.
The Lip Sync feature is probably the easiest and coolest thing new users will
see in TBS. TBS will allow you to create you animated character and assign
mouth movements for the phonetic sylables in speech. Once you've got mouth
positions for all the sounds you can import an audio file and TBS will synch
your mouth positions with the analysed audio file. In practically no time you
can have a completed animation just by running the lip synch feature.
Pegs are way for creating advanced camera moves in your animations. TBS is
well equiped for allowing advanced panning, trucking and other camera
movements that other programs just aren't capable of or are illsuited for.
Also TBS is set up for 3D movement making it really easy to make your 2d
Drawings seem like vast 3D worlds, since the cameras actually move in a 3D
space.
Once you have mastered TBS and have a library of characters and sets it is
super easy to import all of your pieces to assemble complete animations. The
work flow and development process is super fast and what would have taken days
in the past can easily be accomplished in hours. TBS is an amazing piece of
software that has revolutionized the Animation industry.
Final Thoughts
The learning curve for Toon Boom Studios is steep. On their website they sale
DVDs with tutorials for learning how to animate using cut outs, and they
clearly state that the time required for the lesson is 4 hours (and that is
probably optimistic). It is a tough program to tackle, but the assuring thing
is that the company cares enough to give you free tutorials to get started.
Toon Boom really gives you all the tools to start animating, and I'm sure with
practice, dedication and some artistic talent, you could easily make a living
with this program. Therefore I think the price tag ($399) is easily
justified. It is a powerful program that is an all-in-one solution for
animating. If you'd like to get your toes wet and aren't sure of spending the
money on TBS there are a few options. The first option is downloading the
free trial of TBS. You can try the entire program out for 30 days for free.
The second option is to get the watered down version, Toon Boom Express, which
doesn't have all the features (like lip sync, no cut out animation tools, no
animated elements, and limited pegs, cameras, and scenes) for a fraction of
the cost ($99.99 USD)
Toon Boom Studio is a MUST HAVE for anyone SERIOUS about Animation