Introduction to Pegs Toon Boom Tutorial
Toon Boom’s peg system is a vital part of the animation process, and is one of the main reasons animating with Toon Boom is easier than animating in Flash.
The concept of pegs is not new. Traditional animation studios have always used pegs as a registration system to properly line up the many drawings that must be created. This is especially useful when a series of drawings such as a walk cycle must be moved across the screen. Toon Boom builds on the peg system in a digital fashion, offering the animator helpful tools to move characters.
There are two kinds of pegs in Toon Boom (as of version 3.5): standard pegs and internal pegs. Standard pegs allow you to group drawings together as if in a folder, and then move the entire group around the screen as a single unit. To use the walk cycle example once again, a character’s legs can be doing one thing, his arms are swinging along in rhythm with his bouncing torso, all of it attached to a single peg that can be moved. The standard peg is also the type of peg to use if the movement being animated needs to be eased in or out, a common occurrence.
Internal pegs are a relatively new addition to Toon Boom, and basically assigns a pivot point to each drawing, which may then be positioned as you see fit. All drawings naturally have this internal peg. They are not as robust as standard pegs but what they lack in depth they make up for in ease of use and setup time.
A common character setup would look like this (each line is a new layer):
sparky_peg (peg)
–torso (drawing)
—-left leg (drawing)
—-right leg (drawing)
—-left arm (drawing)
—-right arm (drawing)
Each drawing has it’s own internal peg, but the animator has access to the standard peg to move the entire character, which is the parent over all the drawings.
We will be implementing these concepts in future tutorials, so I wanted to make sure the introductory ideas had be laid out.
JK has written a more comprehensive article on pegs that I highly recommend, if you’re interested in diving deeper into the rabbit hole.
Tags: pegs, toon boom tutorials