Toon Boom vs Flash
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?
Toon Boom Strengths
There are many things that Toon Boom can do that Flash animators wish they had access to. Note that some of these can be accomplished in Flash via additional plugins, but not by default.
- Parent Child Relationship - The most powerful integrated tool in the Toon Boom arsenal is proper parent child relationships between elements. The ability to attach one drawing to another and have it mimic the parent’s movements is a key feature of limited animation. Flash users have been begging for this functionality for years but neither Macromedia or Adobe has seen fit to grant this feature.
- Detailed Camera Controls - Toon Boom you to easily pan, zoom and track your camera. The system offers budding directors all the camera control they’ll need.
- Cell Controls - Used for quickly changing a drawing for a frame of any particular element, Toon Boom Studio can inherently do what Flash requires a plugin for (AnimSlider Pro).
- Z-Axis Control - The ability to place elements with a z-axis 3D environment is an important tool in the animator’s arsenal. By default Flash hinders animators by forcing a dual-plane environment.
- Exposure Sheet - Traditional animators are accustomed to using exposure sheets to draw their characters. This allows you to view many drawings at once and really nail your timing.
- Library Management - While Flash allows you to import and export items from other movies there is no distinct library management tool. Toon Boom allows easy drag and drop capabilities to quickly managed your digital assets.
Flash Strengths
- Actionscript - The scripting language integrated into Flash continues to be a powerful asset, allowing Flash to do what it’s best at: web publishing. Database interaction, custom forms, interactive quizzes are all possible with Actionscript. This advanced scripting can be put to good use in animation as well, especially for things that would be difficult to animation by hand like particle effects.
- Blur Effect - Flash MX saw the first bitmap blur effect for vector graphics, and this has proven to be a useful tool for animators looking to push the envelope with impressive realism.
- Customizable Preloaders - Toon Boom currently has a default preloader that can be assigned to SWF files but it can not be modified. Flash allows you to create and edit your preloaders how you see fit.
So Which is Better?
If your animation requires interaction Flash is the clear choice. Toon Boom is centered around animation throughout, which makes it preferred by animators. Toon Boom has great integration with Flash though, so using them both together makes a great animation studio.
Tags: flash, toon boom studio
May 11th, 2008 at 5:14 pm
I think Flash and after Effects working together makes a much better animation studio…
August 9th, 2008 at 11:34 pm
Flash and after effect… great combination,true, but… not for cartoons.
September 23rd, 2008 at 5:24 am
I can’t draw but very much interested to know…
where can I learn toonboom animation including drawing characters.help me…..
which is having a beter future?whether flash or toonboom
November 4th, 2008 at 8:00 pm
Yup Flash is good for actionscript and I used to own flash MX before my kid brother lost the serial number. Now it’s useless to me until I find it.
I agree that Toonboom and Flash make complementary tools in the animators toolset.
Though I’d much like to have After Effects. Too bad it’s expensive though.
March 4th, 2009 at 2:16 pm
Flash is the better choice in all cases, price, features, and versatility. A creative animator can easily use flash with a “non traditional” approach and create richer animation faster than with TBS and TBA. And i do not agree with this articles statement that it is the natural choice of traditional animators especially because I am one. Traditional animators want modern tools, modern work flows, and not just a digital approach to doing the work the same old fashion way.
X-sheets are great in real life. yo hold then look them over, and are easy to reference. In a digital work flow they are a pain in the ass and a waste of valuable screen real estate. I’m sorry but i will never understand what the big deal is about having an x-sheet in an animation software. To me that’s the first sign of a company who’s trying hard but still has it all wrong. It’s a digital age, and I’m surprised no one has come up with a more clever approach to visualizing an animation timeline on a computer screen.
Traditional animation is about creating quality work, and always pushing the envelope in terms of the techniques and procedures used to achieve the desired “hand drawn” look and feel despite the actual techniques used. Add to that, the need to always push production value despite the actual styles used. Having said that, hard core “traditional animators” would never opt for tools that “lock” them into doing things the same old fashion way. Or tools that define your works look and feel. It should be us who decide how our characters look an feel and not have the style of our work defined by the software limitations. This was Flash problem for a long time. Toon Boom is still at that stage where flash was back in version 3 in term of its drawing and editing tools.
In Flash, a traditional animator can easily drop in a temp layer in which they can rough out an entire sequence, set that layer to guide layer so it doesn’t get published. And use a second layer to clean up the sequence. In TB i have to deal with pegs and and junk i never reall want to have to deal with for the simplest of tasks.
The line control you get with flash is superior which allows you to create work that ranges anywhere from that typical web cartoon look with the heavy varied line width and plastic flat look to more refined feature quality look such as work seen in feature films like The road To El Dorado, Brother Bear, or Cowboy Bebop as examples. But with TB you are pretty much limited to producing work along the lines of dragon ball z and Powepuff girls at themore complex of the levels. You will provably never see work that looks like Cowboy Bebop done in TBS or TBA, the amount of work around required is just not worth it, while in flash you can do it in a business as usual approach. So all the bells and whistles are great if the desired look and feel of you production is strictly based on that flat limited animation look with the heavy lines and flat look and 1d dimensional visual performances. But if want true depth and performance range in your characters, flash is a lot less limiting. (note i didn’t say better, it’s just less limiting).
The color management feature is a great idea in TB. It can easily be done in Flash too using bitmap swatches. Paint with a red bitmap, then change the color of that swatch, everywhere you used that swatch will be dynamically adjusted just like in TB. Flash wins in my book because of its ability to use non dynamic swatches in additional to bitmap swatches. Which “under the hood” is the only think TB can actually do.
TB products are all pretty much dependent on the use of an external graphics tablet for drawing, Flash feels quite natural even if all you have is a mouse.
Actionscript is great but only if your doing web work, most traditional animators look for the ability to be able to export their final pieces to video, so i wouldn’t even use actionscript or any of the softwares dynamic features as a comparison feature because all in all flash dynamic features are not exportable so whether its flash or toon boom most professional animators will used an external tool for dynamic effects such as After effects or particle illusion etc.
Don’t get me wrong, I love TB and yes I agree that it has its place in certain animators tool box, but a comparison between TB and Flash is really just unfair to TB because pound for pound Flash flash stands out as the superior product. Especially for traditional animators, who are anything but traditional.
I always like looking at these type of comparisons, the thing that always strikes me even with the official marketing materials is the need to emphasize a traditional animators approach but focus strictly on web output. I challenge anyone here who doesnt agree with me to actually do their own tests. do a simple walk cycle, try to recreate a short sequence from any film or TV show using the same character and artistic style. do it with TB and do it Flash. And evaluate how much harder or time consuming it is to create the same thing in either product and actually note which of the products features you actually made use of in order to perform you task.
March 10th, 2009 at 10:19 pm
Flash has transparancy and other things toon boom doesn’t plus everything easier
April 18th, 2009 at 5:32 am
iam pro in flash from long time ..there is nice futures in the toon boom
but it work for templates ..based on joints ,its ideal for cartoon ..
but in real time animaton it fails ..its not fast on taplets than flash and its
new boy compared to flash ..
i just tested my self in it but ..i can hardly cope with ..the only thing
is good is lips thing ..but also there is one in flash but u must control it
your self
May 24th, 2009 at 3:59 am
@John papanot .
Flash & After Effects .. Is the best combination for cartoons.. we can use After Effects for Composing And We Can use Camera in After Effects .. All The Pro Animators Use After Effects To compose
June 5th, 2009 at 9:22 pm
re transparency in toon boom studio, you can import photoshop files that have transparent areas such as windows and semi transparent ones too..they all import just fine so whilst you cannot DRAW inside toonboom and create/edit transparency you CAN certainly have semi transparent assests in any toon boom project.
also note that any imported swf vector based artwork from flash come in fine and you can have semi transparent items created in flash imported and you can edit their fill and they remain transparent, even change a solid color semi transparent fill to a gradient fill inside toon boom studio…
a workaround yes, but it does ‘work’ :^)
June 5th, 2009 at 9:32 pm
also does flash cs4 have a selectable, trasnformable animatable camera yet?
June 5th, 2009 at 9:55 pm
you know what?
…you CAN create transparent elements within toon boom studio…just been looking into it!
i’m a new user to toon boom, so I’m still learning!
you add a color transform effect found in element>add>color tranform effect you then can dial in or out the alpha of that element…and you can animate that transparency also btw withkeyframing the effect over time.
July 3rd, 2009 at 1:56 pm
I am a critic, and often a harsh one, of ToonBoom. And now I am just Genuinely upset. When I saw this title,I thought, “to think that a human being who is acquainted with the graphics/animation industry would even think of posting such blasphemy in public view”.
It is no question that flash is better, in fact I could use four of Adobe’s programs, illustrator included, and animate something better than TBS ever could. The first reason I could is because all of their programs support raster effects, drop shadows, that actually fade out, glows etc, and that not the only reason, they are numerous, which I wont get into.
And now to compare TBS with Flash? “Oh no they di’nt”. I understand that the peeps at TBS are trying to promote their product to be on par with Flash, but sadly it cannot be, so please slow down, develop your program a bit more, then you can talk.
The only thing not present in flash is the ability to lip sync based on audio track, and that just a sand on a beach compared to what Flash can do, I am seriously upset.:-(
July 3rd, 2009 at 2:04 pm
Toon Boom vs Flash
Out come
ToonBoom Knocked out in the first round
(on account that they didn’t have a back bone, or any form of bone for that matter, so flash just paved them over with its new IK in CS4)
-as for TBS’s pegs, the only ‘peg’ that flash knows is mpeg, because its in the plethora of media formats that flash can handle/convert and embed.
Oh did I mention that ToonBoom got knocked out in the first 24 frames, Ouch!
July 5th, 2009 at 10:23 pm
It seems people forget that toon boom opus (I believe it’s called digital pro now) has more feature films to it’s name than flash.
August 10th, 2009 at 5:19 pm
Look at all of you talking how great is flash, strange thing all the big studios use toon boom , don’t ya think?
August 19th, 2009 at 12:44 pm
Ricky: I doubt that your comment on ‘all the big studios’ using Toon Boom stands up on closer inspection… in Canada (the only country I can legitimately comment on) the vast majority of studios use Flash.
I know that Big Bad Boo in Vancouver uses Toon Boom exclusively, that Bardel and Mercury have both done at least one series in Toon Boom, and that 9Story completed one show - but these are only a handful of examples out of dozens and dozens of properties and projects produced every year, all of which are done in Flash.
Out of the last seven studios I have worked for, none of them used Toon Boom.
September 7th, 2009 at 11:37 am
I have used flash for several years. It has high quality functions and can be extended further by plug-ins. I saw many professional studios use Flash. It is a fact that flash has gained its reputation for its majority. Most cartoon animators use following softwares to make cartoons and good quality animations including 3d effect:
1. 3D-Max
2. Poser
3. Flash
4. Maya
As you see Flash places 3rd, Toonboom is cannot be compared to such a great animation software.
I used the Toonboom trial version. I tried to create a short animation. But, I could not meet up my need with it. But, it is a really good software for beginners.
Here I give you some tips: You can use Toonboom along with Flash for a great animation. You can use photoshop to create frames, pictures, shapes, effects and more for high quality animation. I would like Adobe Director for 3d animation and After effects for composing. If you are new to animation creation you can use PIVOT. Again, Toonboom is not better than Flash in any side. But, yet I liked the easy lip sync system of Toonboom, I worked hard on that part in Flash, once I made a good lip sync template I used those on every animations.
BEST WISHES… Happy animating.
September 18th, 2009 at 9:01 am
Toon Boom is the best according to this site!
http://toonboom-vs-flash.blogspot.com/
October 31st, 2009 at 5:47 pm
soooooo if toon boom is so bad why does their client list include:
(copypasta from wikipedia)
Walt Disney Animation Studios
Walt Disney Television Animation
Nelvana
Warner Bros. Animation
Mercury Filmworks
China Central Television
Toonz India Ltd
eMation
Rough Draft Korea
Alphanim
and Cosgrove Hall
toon boom must be doing something right… oh, and they never said it was better than Flash in this article. only that it’s a better straight-animation tool than flash is.
but you know what’s really cool about Toon Boom?
…
come on…
… guess!
… give up?
no “wordmath.”
December 29th, 2009 at 3:48 pm
People misunderstand just because Flash does better things doesn’t mean it’s better for animation. It’s better for web development animations, but it’s nowhere what it needs to be for a real animators software package. Alot of people in here are just going…Flash, yeah. Because it’s better for this and that. And some comments are just plain ridiculous. Flash being better for traditional animators…lol no. Alot of the stuff I read in here are purely because people have no idea how to use ToonBoom, or get frustrated way too fast and give up. Then go…yeah…flash is better. Nobody has even considdered about the other main mediums of export.
Ive used Flash Since Flash 5, so nearly 9 Years and I can tell you right now, for Hand Drawn and Parented Tween Animation. Toon Boom holds it’s complete own and in some cases, can’t be touched by Flash.
I love how all the amazing extras in TB has totally been ignored in this thread. You can scan and convert straight away to vector in ToonBoom. Heck…you can just plain twain acquire. You need a seperate source for Flash to do that. And if you want to scan a serious of Traditionally animated images it’s far quicker. Things like you assign colours to specific objects. So if you do an entire animation and think, hmm that guys coat, face or whatever could do with a more hint of red, you change the assigned colour in the palette and it changes it all. In flash you would have to go through it Frame by Frame colouring re filling it all in one by one. And if you have shadows…heck you will be there forever at 30fps.
Heres another. See when you tween a bit map in flash, and slowly zoom/pan it in or out and does that really annoying shakey effect…yeah. Toon Boom doesn’t do that, it scales pixels accordingly and correctly. Like After effects. How about being able to rotate your canvas at a push of a button instead of rotating your wacom. Or when zooming in the Brush tool is in ratio to the brush size like photoshop, not to the canvas zoom ratio like flash. Which is AWFUL for traditional animation. It means if you want to get up close and put in steady hand detailing you cant, because when you zoom in, your brush is the tiny.
And That guy, Ibis saying flash is cheaper! What in earth!? TB is USD$179 Flash is USD $699. Saying That you can use two layers in FLash and use one for clean up and things like the line control is better…Have you even used Toon Boom?! Flash only allows the largest size of a pressure sensitive movement. Toon Boom gives the ability to show the line thickness at the softest point too, not just the hardest point and you can use multiple layers and clean up as well on a foreground layer. Saying you are limited to that style of TB is ridiculous. have you seen the array of proffessional TB Animations? :/ How about the Simpsons movie…or the rugrats movie..
As for that challenge you. I dont have to, because as a Traditional Animator for a decade, I choose to use both. But when I do a job which requires Traditional 2D Animation, ToonBooms Tools are quicker, more precise and the shortcuts speed up the process double time. As I said, Ive used Flash for Nearly 9 Years, and Toon Boom for about 5.
Webdevelopment Flash is the Bomb, but as for Full Blown 2D Animation, Flash doesn’t even compare. To recieve best results you should both as well as after effects or whatever compositing program you like. Then an editing program to put the shots and soundtrack together.