Toon Boom Studio 4
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.
New Toon Boom Studio 4 Features
The engineers at Toon Boom have been hard at work creating new functionality for their loyal animating customers.
Feathering
A completely new feature is a blurring utility called feathering. Vector graphics are not, by their nature, very good at displaying blurred or anti-aliased edges. Toon Boom and Flash can create nice crisp edges and outlines easily enough. With feathering Toon Boom Studio 4 can now take any drawing and blur it’s edges. It is configurable, which is useful for arriving at the perfect amount of fading.
At this time feathering is not a true Toon Boom special effect, but rather a utility. There has been some minor uproar on the Toon Boom forums to coax the developers into integrating this as a full-blown effect, hopefully such a feature isn’t far in our future.
Configurable Interface
The windows in Toon Boom Studio 4 can be shaped and resized to best match your ideal work environment. Once configured you can save the layout and name it however you like, making it easy to choose later from a dropdown menu.
Scissors Feature
A new feature is the scissors, which allows you to quickly cut and deform detailed parts of a drawing. It provides a bounding box as well for easy manipulation.
Better Web Integration
Offering the use of embedding code and a preloader is an important step towards improved web-based integration. Toon Boom Studio 4 offers these as options for your .swf output, although the preloader itself is not very configurable. It is a start, however.
Assorted Bits and Pieces
Toon Boom Studio 4 also includes many minor updates and improvements. As with any major upgrade there are always going to be those application fixes and adjustments that simply don’t make it onto the back of the box.
Toon Boom Studio 4 is a great application. It’s more stable than Toon Boom Studio 3.5, and continues to impress with it’s easy of use and the quality of the movies it exports. If you’re interested in trying it before investing in a new animation application you should download the free trial.
Tags: toon boom studio
February 6th, 2008 at 9:40 am
Toon Boom Studio 4 was a wonderful surprise when I got my hands on it. It’s works very much like a toned down version of Studio Pro/Harmony. Some of the bells and whistles are missing, but when I get home from the studio to work on independent projects there’s no longer the ‘culture shock’ of moving between two vastly different interfaces for doing basically the same thing.
I’m interested to see what other effects will be making an appearance in future patches/versions.
February 6th, 2008 at 10:21 am
Harmony/Solo is one of those applications that I hope to have a chance to see in action some day. Even Digital Pro would be impressive.
I keep hearing about several animated movies being made with the Harmony suite (The Simpsons for example), I just imagine it being an awe-inspiring application. I wonder if if comes complete with a “Send to Korea to Make Look Pretty” button.
February 8th, 2008 at 2:46 am
Ugh, I’m sure that one day soon, there’ll be something very similar to the “Send to Korea” button, possibly a “Send to India” or “Send to Singapore”. Unfortunately there’s a glitch in the program that links these buttons to the “Jobless Domestic Animators” Utility.
As far as I can tell, Solo IS Studio Pro it’s just been re-branded. Harmony isn’t much different, it just comes with a bunch more editing and compositing stuff I think.
Toon Boom’s been a force in features for a while, Mostley in the realm of compositing and digital ink and paint. I’d be interested myself to see if theres been a ‘Tradigital’ feature film made with the software.
February 8th, 2008 at 2:49 am
FYI - Two TV shows done in Harmony are ‘Ruby Gloom’ and ‘Grossology’. They were animated by Nelvana and Mercury Filmworks and shown on YTV in Canada. Don’t know if they’re shown anywhere in the US yet. You can Google them to check out the sites tho…might find some clips to check out. : )
It seems more studios are starting to make the switch from Flash to Harmony.
February 8th, 2008 at 10:37 am
@SteveSloan, Ah, I wasn’t aware of the rebranding, good to know. I need to keep my terms straight.
@Karen, I’ve seen bits of Ruby Gloom and I really like the style. I haven’t seen Grossology, I’ll have to see if YouTube can enlighten me. Did you work on either series?
February 8th, 2008 at 12:52 pm
I didn’t, but a lot of my ex-students did. And my better half runs the Mercury studio out west. Ruby is just wrapping up this week and you can find grossology here: http://www.ytv.com/programming/shows/grossology/
I think those animators will find they have an advantage over the Flash guys in the near future. It takes more training to learn Harmony and if they’re already experienced, they’ll get the jobs.
Until it all goes overseas of course…: )
February 8th, 2008 at 12:58 pm
Oh, and I actually believe that Solo is the ’single’ version of Harmony. More for the freelance/independent professional artist. Harmony is only worth it for the big studio set up because of all the licensing fees and better production flow. I think that’s what the main difference is.
February 8th, 2008 at 3:16 pm
Indeed Solo is the stand-alone version of Harmony. Biggest difference in between the software is that Harmony is working on a database (server/client setup) and support high volume scanning.
There is actually a no time limit demo version Digital Pro (which is the newest version of Solo) available so if you want to give a look to the software feel free to do so but don’t spend too much time on it we are still looking forward to get more animation on CalicoMonkey ;).
February 8th, 2008 at 6:16 pm
Heh. Digital Pro would be nice, but even if it’s the bees knees (god I’m old) it’s price tag is more than slightly out of reach. Maybe I’ll have a donation drive to see about purchasing a license someday.
Regarding the next animation, I totally just finished the script for Episode 11. Woo! It will launch on Feb 19.
February 11th, 2008 at 10:52 am
@Karen:
I’m an animation supervisor at Mercury Ottawa, Small world!
Other shows done in Harmony, Gerald McBoing Boing (I believe its on Nick in the States) Wierd Years, 6Teen. All Mercury filmworks joints. (With Nelvana on 6Teen) and all, in my humble opinion, head and tails above most flash productions.
@Will:
Yeah Digital pro is a bit pricey, and you REALLY have to be able to justify it, Studio 4.0 can give us a lot of what we need as indipendants right now, and Digital Pro might be ‘gilding the lily’ a bit.
February 11th, 2008 at 4:30 pm
@Steve…ha! I actually wondered that, since you said you work on Toon Boom during the day…so few studios do. They worked on Gerald out here too. I do storyboards (for Studio B right now). Say HI to Clint for me…he was my DIP teacher way back when (before he started Mercury).
And yes this industry is small isn’t it? Everybody knows someone who’s worked somewhere : )
February 11th, 2008 at 7:32 pm
And now I know two people who have worked somewhere.
Be sure to check out each other’s sites:
http://www.karenjlloyd.com
http://www.uponanimation.com
March 17th, 2008 at 10:14 pm
Well I’m very familiar with previous versions of Toonboom though it would do me much good to look at these tutorials because I’m sure there are some changes and new features I have to get familiar with.
Yes animating characters with pegs is still frustrating for me which is why I’m still hanging around.
March 18th, 2008 at 8:56 am
Depending on which version of Toon Boom you’re coming from Rhiannon, you may find that that Toon Boom 4 can offer quite a bit. My understanding is that Toon Boom 2 and earlier versions did not allow elements to have internal pegs - everything had to have a regular peg. This changed with Toon Boom 3, and now it’s considerably faster to assign internal pegs for your drawings.
March 29th, 2008 at 4:48 pm
This might sound stupid, but, is it possible to use a JPG (character surrounded by blue/green screen) or even a JPG showing a back round environment imported into Toon Boom? Or is it something that i have to use After Effects’ Puppet Tool for…
Just working on a project that i started by creating characters into JPG and using Crazytalk 5 for the “Characters” to talk and now looking for something in order for them to be animated/moving them…
Thank you for your time,
Alex
March 31st, 2008 at 4:57 pm
@Alzeus,
You could use Toon Boom for that, but there is no automatic blue/green screen filter. A better option is to convert the JPGs into PNGs so that you can keep that transparent alpha channel.
Of course, you could always do your lip syncing directly in Toon Boom, but it sounds like you’ve already created that in Crazytalk (which I’m not familiar with).