hands on 2002

Toon Boom Studio for OSX

by Ian Beattie
of DIGIPOST

Toon Boom Studio is the digital equivalent of the traditional animator’s workspace: draw and animate. With Toon Boom, creating digital animations for the web has never been easier.

Hand-drawn paper sketches can be scanned and vectorised for use in Scenes. The drawing is then organized with the Exposure Sheet and subsequent drawings are viewed in onion-skin layers. Illustrator files can also be imported.

The Drawing mode features a Light Table and Drawing Area that is fully customizable with 12 or 16 field grids, perspective and quick rotations of the drawing area. The latter helps the animator draw at the correct angle; something I wish was available in Illustrator or Photoshop.

Toon Boom has an innovative and easy to use lip-synch to sound feature. By generating lip charts featuring your character's mouth, Toon Boom will help you develop great sound and voice effects in your animation. Handling all sorts of sound files (MP3, WAV, AIFF, PCM) Toon Boom will add the sound to your Exposure Sheet. Adding effects and fades are easy, but the real time saver is how Toon Boom can help assign the appropriate lip chart designations to your imported voice tracks. As a result, one of the most tedious elements to traditional animation is conquered in a single option. You can immediately begin testing how your character's mouth will react to voice tracks of any length and in any language.

The 3D possibilities brought into the world of 2D animation by Toon Boom's camera in the Scene Planning Mode are limitless. Dealing with a multi-layered 2D background is quite easy given the logical interface in the Scene Planning Mode

Toon Boom can finally save your digital animation in Quicktime, Flash or directly into iMovie. All exporting selections come with a variety of options.

If you have doodled on a paper napkin and yearned to make your idea come alive, Toon Boom is the answer.

For professional animators there are simply far too many tools in this entire Studio to ignore.

You can download an evaluation of Toon Boom Studio for OS X at www.ToonBoom.com or contact the local distributor, Pericon.com Pte Ltd, at 68417233
Price: S$690 (Commercial)
S$230 (Educational)
Prices are quoted before GST.

Ian Beattie is from the Mac Users Group of Singapore. Its website is at www.macuser.org.sg