Breaking Glass Toon Boom Tutorial

Kroaky, a new Toon Boom user on the well-maintained forums expressed some frustration while trying to animate glass breaking. This tutorial is in response to his post, and hopefully can help him with his questions. Credit goes Ugo, the omnipresent helpful administrator of the Toon Boom forums for answering his question initially.

You can download the complete Toon Boom file used in this tutorial here (Mac formatted).

The specific issue centered around creating multiple keyframes, but only changing the original drawing. The result was an animation that didn’t change at all over time, since each keyframe only contained the same identical drawing.

The confusion lies in the fact that Toon Boom (correctly) treats frames differently from the objects within the frame, just like Flash. Kroaky meant to copy and paste the objects in the frame, but instead copied the frame itself, which lead to frustration. I attempted to show fast and efficient way of creating the scenario Kroaky describes with a simple 16 frame animation containing seven drawings. Here are the steps I took (click on each image to enlarge it).

I started by creating the glass drawing element, and then drew a basic window using the pencil tool and line tool. Notice how in the timeline at the bottom the “glass” element spans 16 frames.

I then used the pencil tool with the smoothness level turned all the way down to one to start creating my initial cracks in the glass on a new drawing element, on the first frame. With the smoothness practically turned off, we’ll get some random jaggedness in our line shapes, which will help the believability of our cracked lines.

Then, instead of adding a new keyframe, I used the drawing select tool (indicated here with a red arrow), to choose the drawing I just created (not the frame itself). I copied that, moved to the next frame, then pasted the drawing.

If you were to look at the Exposure Sheet right now you would see that there are two drawings (as Ugo stated in the forums), as well as two frames in the “crack” level in the animation (indicated here with a red arrow).

The remainder of the animation is simply repetition: add a bit more cracking glass to the current frame, select everything you just drew, copy, move to the next frame, paste. On the seventh frame I decided the point was made and simply extended the final frame out over the remainder of the animation (’R’ is the keyboard shortcut to do this by default).

And here is the final product:

I’m thinking about submitting it to AniBoom, with executive producer credits going out to Kroaky, Ugo and JK.

What the hell does an executive producer do anyway? I hope it’s somebody that brings in danishes. I frickin love danishes.

Tags: toon boom tutorials