ToonBoom Animate released

[chluaid]

ToonBoom have just released Animate and I've been using it for the past couple of days.
It's like a little brother to ToonBoom Digital Pro, with a nicer price and a great set of features and capabilities. Even veteran Flash users will feel quite at home in its interface but the real payoff comes when you hit the render button. The effects you can apply to your work such as highlights, tones, blurred & variable opacity masking can give your hard work an absolutely stunning finish. Some of us already know that ToonBoom's colour management system has always been to die for, so you'll find that in Animate too. Basically, you can organise your colours with names and separate palettes.. you can tint entire palettes, for example for evening, underwater or sunset variations. On top of all that, updating a colour in the palette will auto-update it through your entire project.. no repainting necessary.

The one downside for me is that, just like Digital Pro, it has no text tool so titles and credits for your film have to be done in Photoshop or something and imported into Animate.

Anyways, whether you're an established animator (traditional or Flash), or you're looking for a career in animation or just want to make short films for YouTube, Animate will give you the edge over Flash because it's a dedicated animation package built by people who are actively working with their user community to improve their products. Not to mention that getting a substantial animated short from Flash to a video format is a bit of a shit-fight
*update - posted questions answered:
Animate's camera view (Stage) has anti-aliasing - in other words, the unattractive pixelation on your drawings in the camera view is smooth in ToonBoom Animate.

[C.S. Murphy]

Looks fairly reasonable price and feature-wise.

The thing that I really don't like about the authoring mode is that your clean vector artwork looks pixelated which is one on the main reasons why I've never really ventured into Toon Boom land.


   Is this something that is fixed with this version?

[chluaid]

yep That was a big sticking point with me on previous versions but that's why the ToonBoom guys rock.. they hear their community and fix/implement stuff like this where they can.

[C.S. Murphy]

I've been noodling around with the trial for a a few hours and I must say that I'm really impressed with the way the UI is laid out. The thing that urks me is that the camera has no pivot point to make the camera 3d. Maybe I'm not fishing hard enough?

The perspective view is awesome though.

Adam, is it possible to setup a perspective view and create a camera view out of it?

Kinda like the way 3d programs have a camera to view.

[chluaid]

yeah camera doesn't rotate in ToonBoom, otherwise that would just be a 3D program in which you could model stuff and free roam the camera.. it's still a 2D program but it simulates 3D camera in the same way that the traditional animation multiplane camera does. The Top and Side views for the camera just help you automate the process of carefully moving each element at the proper speed and distance to simulate 3D.

The perspective view is the only true 3D part but you've probably already discovered that you can't do anything there, other than look at your layer order. Hopefully the next version will allow 3D rotate, scale & translate of your picture planes, just like Flash CS4 does..

by the way, here's a quick test I did with the camera in a multilayer scene. I've just shown two stretched versions so you can see how the elements are placed in 3D space. This is .SWF export btw:

<a href="http://www.biteycastle.com/forum/images/help/TBAnimate/untitled.swf" target="_blank">http://www.biteycastle.com/forum/images/help/TBAnimate/untitled.swf</a>

<a href="http://www.biteycastle.com/forum/images/help/TBAnimate/untitled.swf" target="_blank">http://www.biteycastle.com/forum/images/help/TBAnimate/untitled.swf</a>

<a href="http://www.biteycastle.com/forum/images/help/TBAnimate/untitled.swf" target="_blank">http://www.biteycastle.com/forum/images/help/TBAnimate/untitled.swf</a>

[JobbleFruit]

I've also downloaded the trial and trying to get used to it although it keeps obtaining errors and needing to be closed. Memory could not be 'written' aparently. Any way of fixing this?

I am very much a Flash man as that's all I've used so getting used to this will be hard but I need to expand my horizons.

-JF

[HampoArgent]

I just got ToonBoom Animate Pro and I'm loving it.

Converting from Flash CS3 to ToonBoom for a number of reasons

• More flexibility with symbols
• HD support, Flash crashes/lags when I try to do HD, even when exporting image sequences
• 3D workspace for fly-throughs and pans, better than Flash
• Better cut-out animation support
• Just better in most areas

Just curious, are there any other good resources for ToonBoom learning, I learned ToonBoom briefly back in 2007 and I'm a bit rusty

[chluaid]

yeah they're hard to come by but there's a few sites that have some tutorials. I plan on writing some on the WoodenBlog and in the meantime, you might like to check out betterflashanimation.com, which is a toonboom blog with a number of contributors, me included

[HampoArgent]

already checked out BetterFlashAnimation.com, interesting stuff and a few good exercises there. not meaning to sound like its ass kissing but you and Justin were the reason I decided to change to ToonBoom from Flash. I am currently working through some of the tutorials packaged with the software, but they are still a bit vague

[SecretDimension]

I've also moved from Flash to Toon Boom Animate Pro.

I was given this as a present (to myself) lol and have a week off from work, so I shall be hitting the tutorials hard and post my results in the appropriate forums.

[Snowman]

How does TB Studio hold up against Animate? What features are missing from Studio that make purchasing Animate really worth it?

[SeeHaus]

Can you open .fla files from CS4 with ToonBoom? I know that's probably a dumb question but if you can it would be great. I can't find anything about it but then I'm awful and surfing the net.

[Zwickel]

Even if I am more comfortable with flash, it will be much easier to land a job if you know ToonBoom, its crazy all of the companies in Vancouver are switching.