![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Back to the fun!
Jun. 29th, 2004 04:47 pmSo, I finally got to put ToonBoom through it's paces. More on that below. First, I thought I'd mention that I actually DID make an entry for the 10 Second Club It's the evil Charlotte's Web parody.
http://circle.twu.net/animate/10sec/200406_web.mov
Now back to Toon Boom.
All in all, it's pretty fabulous. It was way WAY faster and clearner than working in Flash. It also tends to make really light SWFs due to the way it handles painting and such, and throughput on work was pretty great. It also seems pretty stable so far. (Ran it for 2 days solid without crashing it once) Ocassionally when using the vector draw mode, it would make an odd line coming into my artwork but it was just a display artifact, it wasn't actually in the image and it cleared up when I finished clicking. Also there was some behaviour that was handy to a degree but could also be a bit worrying to the unfamiliar user.
For instance, if you click in the elements window and hit preview, it ONLY previews that layer. If you click in the drawing mode display, it displays that layer and all underneath it. To preview all layers you have to select the topmost layer, then click in the display and preview.
Simiarly, if you copy an object from one frame, then click in the element layer to go to the next frame and paste, nothing happens. You have to click back in the drawing screen. (I just keyboard mapped frame-forward/frame-back keys to cope with this) If you do cut and paste in the elements layer you end up with an instance of that cel, not an actual set of lines. (which is darned handy at times) I also had some trouble getting the viewport set to the region of the page I wanted though I suspect this is just my unfamiliarity with the interface rather than an actual problem. There are also some layout issues with the tools. The paint buck, unpaint, paint unpainted, stroke, and close gaps tools are ALL in the same pull-down. This is extremely inconvenient. Supposedly you can customize to toolbar to make hot buttons for all your favourite tools but I couldn't figure out how to do it immediately. The other tool I noticed desperately lacking was a 'paint behind' type brush. There are times when 'paint unpainted' and 'close gaps' are not really sufficient and a simple fill-type brush would have been very handy.
So after working with it for 2 days I feel like I touched probably 20% of the features, leaving lots of program yet to explore. Some of the really nice features: Import and vectorize (the tool I bought the program for) And most of the ink and paint process is also blindingly fast and easy. Surprisingly I also found I was using the 'rotate lighttable' feature quite a lot. This is a nice one if you do traditional animation because it lets you get those arcs in there just how you like em. The other feature I must gush about is the lipsyncing tool. You just click on your audio track and say 'Display Lipsync' and it looks at the audio and puts together a sample talking head which matches what it thinks the audio track is. For this clip at least, this feature worked amazingly well. I was able to use it's sample as a reference and draw in my lipsync directly as it had interpreted it! It was more than close enough for someone working on a tight schedule. Also, with the instanciated frames, I think I only ended up painting about 6 frames for lipsync. The rest were clones. The entire lip-synch'd segment too less than a half hour! O_O
Whew! Well, I think that's enough for right now. I might write about it some more later. All in all though, it's worth the student price. If I can hotbutton the interface I'll like it a LOT better though. ^_^
http://circle.twu.net/animate/10sec/200406_web.mov
Now back to Toon Boom.
All in all, it's pretty fabulous. It was way WAY faster and clearner than working in Flash. It also tends to make really light SWFs due to the way it handles painting and such, and throughput on work was pretty great. It also seems pretty stable so far. (Ran it for 2 days solid without crashing it once) Ocassionally when using the vector draw mode, it would make an odd line coming into my artwork but it was just a display artifact, it wasn't actually in the image and it cleared up when I finished clicking. Also there was some behaviour that was handy to a degree but could also be a bit worrying to the unfamiliar user.
For instance, if you click in the elements window and hit preview, it ONLY previews that layer. If you click in the drawing mode display, it displays that layer and all underneath it. To preview all layers you have to select the topmost layer, then click in the display and preview.
Simiarly, if you copy an object from one frame, then click in the element layer to go to the next frame and paste, nothing happens. You have to click back in the drawing screen. (I just keyboard mapped frame-forward/frame-back keys to cope with this) If you do cut and paste in the elements layer you end up with an instance of that cel, not an actual set of lines. (which is darned handy at times) I also had some trouble getting the viewport set to the region of the page I wanted though I suspect this is just my unfamiliarity with the interface rather than an actual problem. There are also some layout issues with the tools. The paint buck, unpaint, paint unpainted, stroke, and close gaps tools are ALL in the same pull-down. This is extremely inconvenient. Supposedly you can customize to toolbar to make hot buttons for all your favourite tools but I couldn't figure out how to do it immediately. The other tool I noticed desperately lacking was a 'paint behind' type brush. There are times when 'paint unpainted' and 'close gaps' are not really sufficient and a simple fill-type brush would have been very handy.
So after working with it for 2 days I feel like I touched probably 20% of the features, leaving lots of program yet to explore. Some of the really nice features: Import and vectorize (the tool I bought the program for) And most of the ink and paint process is also blindingly fast and easy. Surprisingly I also found I was using the 'rotate lighttable' feature quite a lot. This is a nice one if you do traditional animation because it lets you get those arcs in there just how you like em. The other feature I must gush about is the lipsyncing tool. You just click on your audio track and say 'Display Lipsync' and it looks at the audio and puts together a sample talking head which matches what it thinks the audio track is. For this clip at least, this feature worked amazingly well. I was able to use it's sample as a reference and draw in my lipsync directly as it had interpreted it! It was more than close enough for someone working on a tight schedule. Also, with the instanciated frames, I think I only ended up painting about 6 frames for lipsync. The rest were clones. The entire lip-synch'd segment too less than a half hour! O_O
Whew! Well, I think that's enough for right now. I might write about it some more later. All in all though, it's worth the student price. If I can hotbutton the interface I'll like it a LOT better though. ^_^
