Toon Boom Studio 3

When Toon Boom Studio hit the market, it filled a huge gap. For a long time, those interested in creating quality cartoons and animation for the web only had one choice – yep, you guessed it, Flash. And as Flash arguably makes further moves towards application development, Toon Boom has become even more desirable for individual digital animators.   

The great thing about Toon Boom Studio is that it’s just so intuitive. The interface is a work of art, with each palette working in harmony with the rest. The idea, if you’re not familiar with traditional animation, is that you create individual drawings in cels within an exposure sheet. You then use this sheet to plan your animation. As well as the exposure sheet, Toon Boom features a more familiar timeline for stacking layers. There’s also a nifty 3D scene-planning feature, which enables you to animate objects on multiple planes – eliminating the need for tweening from small to large to simulate distance.   

Toon Boom also features an innovative and very easy-to-use lip-syncing tool – so giving your character accurate phoneme shapes is a cinch. Drawing is also pretty well covered thanks to the software’s pressure-sensitive tablet support, and you can import a variety of bitmap and vector formats, too.   

But all of this was available in version 2 – and very good it was, too – so what’s new? Well, actually not that much in terms of quantity. Quality, however, is a different matter. The new unified interface eliminates the need to switch between scene planning and drawing modes, plus you can save your workspaces. This feature may be expected from all software applications these days, but it really does speed up the creation process.   

Another major addition (at last) is the ability to add text to your animations. A simple yet well laid out Text palette makes it simple to create and animate type. There’s also a useful new Transform tool (combining the old scale, rotation and skew tools), as well as some nice keyframe workflow improvements. Lip-syncing is also made easier thanks to some improved sound scrubbing.   

But what’s really cool, and we’re sure this will save the likes of Jib Jab (www.jibjab.com) a whole lot of time, is the new Cutter tool, which enables you to take your vector drawings and divide them up into regions to be animated separately. For example, you can remove the hands, arms and head from your character and then animate them individually using pivot points. It’s extremely intuitive, simple to use and really great fun. South Park fans will love it.   

Better export options and a host of other tweaks make Toon Boom 3 a worthwhile upgrade that animators will take to their hearts and cherish forever. It’s an incredibly productive tool and plain good fun, too – this is software you can lose yourself in…