Color Management with Toon Boom Palettes

November 10th, 2008

Toon Boom uses a palette system to maintain its colors. The benefit of this system is that once you create the colors for a character you can easily import that palette into any new cartoons you create, making it easy for you to maintain a consistent design for your cartoon characters. This tutorial will walk you through the basics of creating a new palette for your cartoon characters, and will show you how to save that palette for future cartoons.

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Posted in Beginner | No Comments »

Manual Lip Synch Toon Boom Tutorial

July 22nd, 2008

The automated lip syncing capabilities of Toon Boom Studio are both useful and impressive. However, no matter how well it translates your sound files there’s always some part of the lip sync that will need to be adjusted manually. The automated lip sync is simply not sophisticated enough to capture every nuance of speech. This lip sync tutorial will lay the foundation for you to do manage this process manually.

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Posted in Beginner, Intermediate | 6 Comments »

Wrestling With a Blur Effect in Toon Boom

June 10th, 2008

For some time now Toon Boom animators have been crying out for a proper blur effect to add to their arsenal. If similar vector-based applications like Flash can manage to create bitmapped blur effects certainly Toon Boom can emulate that success?

Toon Boom Studio 4 sought to bridge this missing feature with a feathering tool. Unfortunately, the limitations of this new tool were quickly uncovered.

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Posted in Advanced, Beginner, Intermediate | 3 Comments »

Interview with JK, Professional Toon Boom Animator

April 4th, 2008

All new users of Toon Boom invariably run across the well-maintained forums at ToonBoom.com. Likewise, all visitors to the forum will have a conversation with JK. He is the wise Yoda-esque voice of reason and knowledge on the forums, and is the true definition of a power user of Toon Boom.

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Posted in interview | 1 Comment »

Star Wars Special Effects: Create a Lightsaber

April 1st, 2008

In honor of Episode 3 being released on cable this week (as if I needed a reason), let’s spend some time using Toon Boom Studio to recreate some of the most interesting special effects from the Star Wars saga. Of course, you can’t talk about Star Wars special effects without starting with the lightsaber.

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Posted in Intermediate | 8 Comments »

Toon Boom vs Flash

March 17th, 2008

Flash has become a popular animation tool in its own right, as anybody that follows Aaron Simpson’s blog Cold Hard Flash can tell you. Even with this surge in popularity the question remains — how does Flash compare with a more formal animation program such as Toon Boom?

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Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

How to use Toon Boom to Create an Animated Gif

February 12th, 2008
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I know what you’re thinking. Why would I want to know how to make an animated gif? Didn’t that stop being cool in 1998? Absolutely. However, when used properly an animated gif can be a useful and entertaining tool in your Toon Boom arsenal. In addition, animated gifs are actually recognized by Google and Yahoo. Links inside SWF files continue to elude the search engines.

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Posted in Intermediate | 8 Comments »

Toon Boom Studio 4

February 5th, 2008

Toon Boom has issued their biggest Studio release yet with the announcement of Toon Boom Studio 4. Let’s take a look at the new features and improvements in this release of Toon Boom’s most popular animation application.

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Posted in Announcement | 19 Comments »

Flip Boom Animation Program for Kids

November 24th, 2007

Toon Boom today announced that they have a new animation program in time for the holidays this year. The program is called Flip Boom, and it’s clearly targeted at a young audience.

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Posted in Beginner | 2 Comments »

Create a Basic Walk Cycle with Toon Boom

August 23rd, 2007

Toon Boom is a very powerful animation program, and like many programs it is not always as user-friendly as it should be. This is a very basic Toon Boom tutorial, and will show you how to create your own cartoon of a nice looping walk cycle, shown here. We’ll also cover the basics of creating parent/child relationships and adjusting pivot points.

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Posted in Beginner | 25 Comments »