Toon Boom Studio for Mac OS X

Flash and the Internet ignited an indie cel-animation explosion back when dot-com entertainment sites such as Atom Films and DEN were plotting the overthrow of the Hollywood studios. That fantasy has vanished, but it has left many new artists with the passion for doing their own animation along with veterans who see Flash in the same way directors now view DV cameras — as a way to make narrative art without a greenlight from a studio. But Flash is not a cel-animator's tool. That's why Toon Boom Studio was created by USAnimation, a long time developer of cel-animation software used at many large studios. TBS is a simplified version of the senior product with a traditional cel-animation workflow that outputs Flash vector-based files.

The first thing to know about TBS is that animators are expected to create the individual cels directly in the computer. TBS does not support import of punched paper. What this means is that it does not have the scanning and alignment features offered by high-end digital ink and paint systems like Toonz or USAnimation. Using a Wacom tablet and stylus instead of a pencil stops some cel animators in their tracks.

As it turns out, there are ways to work around the digital input limitation including attaching a peg bar to a Wacom tablet and tracing over pencil art. However, this adds a great deal of work. A simpler solution is scanning punched paper and using the tracking features in After Effects or Combustion to align the art. TBS can be tricked to accept pencils in this way, but the product is really geared toward a new generation of digital artists that do not have traditional training in cel animation.

The layout of the interface is modular and most of the main tools are available as floating palettes. There are two work modes: Drawing and Sceneplanning. Drawing mode has a traditional field chart, and it's here that you access simple pencil, paint brush, erasure, and primitive shapes (box, circle, and line) to make vector-based characters and backgrounds. Toon Boom also uses QuickTime to import bitmap art, allowing for detailed and painterly sources (even photos) for backgrounds. In Drawing mode you have access to the Exposure Sheet, an animator's familiar column-based spreadsheet form for management of each frame and cel. TBS does not limit the complexity of your art, but being a vector-based program and given the Web origin of Flash, TBS seems optimized for less rather than more drawing complexity. Certainly this is advisable if the work is to be viewed on the Internet.

Sceneplanning mode is perhaps the most interesting aspect of Toon Boom Studio. Several views and windows are provided including: a Camera View, a horizontal Timeline, and top and side diagrammatic camera views. What is immediately obvious is that this is a 2.5D scene space of the type that you would find in After Effects 5.5, Combustion, and Flame. Painted elements, whether a tree, a cloud, or a character, are represented as flat objects and deployed in 3D space. While the elements are flat, the camera can move around them in complex trajectories. This is essentially a tremendously flexible and automatic multiplane system. Objects can be attached to editable spline paths with tick marks to indicate velocity.

The timeline in Sceneplanning mode is the familiar After Effects or Premiere style track view with color-coded tracks that can be easily edited. The Timeline and Exposure Sheet work together but are used differently: the Timeline is not only used to add camera movement and elements (called pegs in TBS), but also to adjust the moment and duration that these effects take place. A peg is essentially an invisible object on which you attach a drawing or a series of drawings that create an action. For example, while in Drawing mode, you would create the individual frames for a dog's walk cycle editing them and naming them in the Exposure Sheet. Switching to Sceneplanning mode and using the Timeline, you would be able to take the dog's walk cycle track and drag its entry point to the sixth second of the scene and adjust its speed across the frame. The Timeline and Exposure Sheet can also display cameras, audio tracks (including waveforms), bitmaps, and multimedia clips. Tracks in the Timeline can be hidden, cloned, and duplicated, and complex hierarchies can be collapsed for easier viewing.

The Preview palette is standard issue with VCR-style stop, play, rewind, loop, and single frame advance/rewind buttons. Flash became popular because of its Web efficiency, so I was pleased to find that the preview speed was good even with lots of objects and camera motion. Still, you may have to render a scene to see it play at the proper speed.

One of the more convenient features of the Camera View is the ability to see a large area of action with one camera and then use a second camera to select only a section of the scene. This can be done by dragging the second camera's red boundary around the point of interest. By dragging the handle of the camera frame, the size of the view can also be changed. This is often the fastest and most intuitive way to line up a shot.

Objects such as characters appear in bounding boxes that can be dragged around the frame for positioning or scaled wider, taller, or proportionally. These changes can be edited numerically in the Properties window or by direct manipulation with the cursor in the Camera View. A third way to make these changes is to manipulate elements using the Function Editor. TBS gives you a big uncluttered curve editor. You use the function curve editor to control movement, rotation, and scaling. You can add points to a curve and manipulate them manually or by using a good selection of preset velocity curves.

TBS also has a Template feature that allows you to resave setups and animation. Templates have icons that help sort out sound files, cameras, or a set of drawings. There is also a Template Browser with various display settings including copyright information. This is clearly aimed at studio operation and professional animators working with large projects and/or volume work. When a project is finally completed, the final output can be either a Macromedia Flash or QuickTime movie.

TBS is a very complete animation product at an extremely affordable price. Up until now, there has been no available animation product with these features for less than $1,000. The manual is clear and thorough, but presumes knowledge of animation. It's rare that a new product provides such a mature and confident approach to workflow. The reason TBS is so good is that it is developed by USAnimation and draws on years of development for the senior product. All the necessary tools for animation are in Toon Boom Studio as well as important refinements for most of the main features.

The only real alternative at this point is DigiCel Flipbook at about three times the price. However, that product supports punched paper sources and provides some additional features. TBS' lack of support for punched paper art is a bit disappointing, and I would also like to see interactivity with the f-curves so that adjustments can be seen in realtime. Those issues aside, TBS is a phenomenal buy. As a teaching tool, it is a great solution, and for experienced animators, it will provide a sane and powerful environment for original work.

Toon Boom Studio is available for Windows and Mac OS X.

Toon Boom Studio
7 Laurier Street East
Montreal, Quebec
Canada H2T 1E4
514/278-8666
www.toonboomstudio.com