TOON BOOM STUDIO QUICKTIME ERROR SKIN
You sketch a series of rough keyposes in the Drawing View for the main action, using the Onion Skin tool to create ghost views of the previous and subsequent movements, followed by a series of intermediate (breakdown, in-between and clean-up) stages creating and tracing all the rough drawings before painting.
Like other high-end 2D software, Animate additionally offers a traditional hand-drawn route, with a frame-based Xsheet (or dope-sheet) to track the drawing workflow and establish timings. You can also set an easing preset so that the motion isn’t so mechanical. IK constraints, known as Nails, can be added to pin feet to the floor, or rigidly control movement. You can also create a hierarchy of body parts in a simple drag-and-drop process, then control animation through Inverse Kinematics (IK). A selection of limb movements can be stored inside symbols, thereafter to be selected using the Library’s Drawing Substitution window and swapped in and out during animation.
To animate limbs, you set pivot points and then rotate, scale, skew, move and select with the Transform tool (Forward Kinematics).
TOON BOOM STUDIO QUICKTIME ERROR PATCH
To fix gaps between limbs you can use classical articulation, where one limb overlays the other, or Patch articulation, where a colour-fill patch is drawn onto a third layer to cover the joint lines. Special functions place the selections in layers to be animated individually. A Cutter tool is provided for this, to chop a character model into discrete pieces ready for independent movement. You can also make use of cut-out animation techniques, either for South Park-style cartoons, or more complex puppet control. It’s a timesaving technique that’s more useful for effects animation, such as water or smoke, than character animation. You can add a trajectory layer called a Peg, to which you can attach drawings and other layers, then move, rotate, scale and skew them through three dimensions according to a path you specify.Īnother string to Animate’s bow is the ability to morph similar shapes (but not colours) over time. The simplest animation is layer-based, with objects following a motion path. As in Toon Boom Studio, this is a depth-enhancing feature, where the action moves through stacked layers in the Z-axis. The camera position is also animated, so when creating a scene you can make use of multiplane camera moves.
PSD format, or add effects such as blurs and glows during post-production.Īnimation takes place on a layer-based timeline: you can use the Flash-style Motion method, with Animate interpolating the movement between keyframes, or you can follow a Stop-Motion route, with no digital interpolation. It’s also possible to create high-quality scenes by importing textures in. There’s an extensive standard colour palette, as well as settings for gradients and transparency. PSD files with layers intact, as well as QuickTime movies and Flash files in. In addition to common image formats, you can bring in. You can, of course, scan images using other applications first. It’s an odd omission, when this built-in facility is offered not only by Toon Boom Studio, but also by cheaper rivals like DigiCel FlipBook. You can also reuse separate elements of your drawing multiple times in one scene, by saving themĪnimate allows you to import graphics, but this is where the lack of a TWAIN scanner import option becomes apparent, especially for the traditional animation path of scanning peg-based key drawings. There’s a multifunctional zoom, hand and rotate tool for scene movement, but a simple mousewheel control for the zoom would be welcome.Īnimate offers a library for storing drawings and animation as templates for reuse in scenes or sharing in their projects. The Contour Editor tool can add, remove or modify points on a vector line and control them with Bézier handles – which, while useful, was occasionally awkward to use. Basic transformations such as repositioning, rotating, scaling or perspective skewing can be carried out using the different handles of the bounding box. There’s also a Shape tool, to draw with circles, lines and squares. This is useful when you’re fixing a drawing or using lots of brush strokes to build up a shape. A Draw Behind mode can be used, as the name suggests, to paint behind art that already exists, and you can select the Flatten option to merge drawing objects and brush strokes into a single layer. There are tools for freehand drawing and tracing, comprising brush and pencil tools with a number of size and contour settings.
For example, you can’t directly scan in bitmaps and convert them to vectors as you can with the other applications, but of all three Toon Boom offerings, only Animate allows you to export directly to Flash Video (.FLV) format (and to. In terms of both features and price, Animate sits between Toon Boom Studio and the more expensive Toon Boom Digital Pro.