Hidden Gems of Animation
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Hidden Gems of Animation Features that deserve more attention
Toon Boom
Toon Boom Studio

Many commonly used features are listed on the box, but Toon Boom Studio has some other powerful features that save a significant amount of time, such as Automatic Lip Sync Mapping, and the Color Palette. These features can ease the production process and allow more time for concentrating on the animated content in your film.

Lip-sync mapping
Color pallette
Feature:
Lip Sync tool

The Lip Sync tool is a valuable timesaver when applying dialogue to a scene. In addition to generating a lip chart in your exposure sheet, the lip-syncing feature will also automatically map your drawings to the lip chart. This eliminates the task of matching lip positions in the exposure sheet, and leaves time for fine tuning. When you have imported your dialogue into a sound element, the Show Lip Sync option calculates lip positions for each syllable in the voice recording. Once you have created lip sync drawings for your character, Modify Lip Sync allows you to choose specific drawings in a given element that will correspond with the lip chart generated by Toon Boom Studio.

For even more control over the lip-syncing process, the V2 series features sound scrubbing. In the Edit Sound dialogue box, you can scrub through and fine tune the synchronization between the voice track and your character?s mouth positions. Toon Boom Studio V2.5 for Mac even has sound scrubbing available in the timeline! Not only does this save even more time when lip-syncing, but it eases the synchronization of sound effects in your scene.

Feature:
Color Palette

When painting elements in a scene, the Color Palette is a practical and timesaving tool. Rather than having to create a color model, Toon Boom Studio allows you to create separate color palettes for each character, object or background element. This feature also allows you to isolate a specific color in a drawing and change it to a different color. The color change in the palette affects all objects colored with this swatch for the entire scene, completely eliminating the task of having to repaint hundreds of frames individually! Using the Palette Style option, an entire palette can be changed to suit the mood of a given scene. For example, if your character is standing in the moonlight instead of outside on a sunny day, you might want to blend the entire palette with blue. In the color palette tab, select the palette and style you would like to change (you can duplicate the current style if you would like to be able to go back to it later). Using the Tint Blend and Tint Offset options, move the sliders to adjust your palette. Anything in your scene that has been painted using this palette will change instantly!.


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Digital Video
Toonz

Feature:
Line quality of scanned artwork
Hand-drawn artwork usually has an emotive quality that may be lost when it is passed on a computer. A process like digitization or vector conversion, may corrupt the original look and feel of drawings and alter the style of the animation. This is a concern for studios that want to produce cartoons  taking advantages of a computer-assisted production without compromising the quality of their work
 
As Toonz is a raster-based software, the scanning process is able to preserve all the nuances of lines, both made by ink pens and pencils. Scanners are directly controlled by Toonz with no intermediate software or drivers, such as TWAIN. This grants a high  accuracy  in the process, so that what is scanned is exactly what is drawn on paper. Thanks to specific settings scanning can be performed at high resolution keeping small the size of files, thus capturing every detail of the hand-made artwork without stuffing your hard-disks. Drawing lines can then be calibrated, making them smoother or thicker, to better suit the director?s needs, without resampling or blowing them up, but basing the calibration on the actual scanned information.

 


On the other hand, production speedups are not left behind. Drawings can be scanned via  an automatic document feeder, with no need to place each drawing on the scanner bed, and automatically auto-centered and set to a proper registration. Ink and paint sessions are quick as outline antialiasing doesn?t stop color ?flooding? when an area is filled with a color.
 
With Toonz you can even balance the line density throughout the animation level, thus solving the very classical problem of drawings made by the key-frame animator and the inbetweener having different line density because of the different pressure applied when drawing on paper.

The line quality in Toonz is one of the main reasons why Director H. Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli, chose Toonz for their last movies Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away and announced Howl?s Moving Castle: innovation without rejecting tradition.

Feature:
Customizable FX

Toonz is an incredibly FX-rich package that provides animators with 46 base FX that can be customized and combined to define macro FX for an infinite number of results. The choice ranges from simple effects like transparency, blur or color fade, to more elaborate ones, like automatic shadow creation, backlit and light-spots.

For each effect you can define as many presets as you want (15 samples can be already found in the FX list) that will be available in any Xsheet sessions. FX can be animated as key values can be set independently for each parameter. Interpolation  between keys can be controlled with function curves, providing control over the most subtle variations.

Feature:
Scintillę

You can also take advantage of Scintillę, a particle engine that has been specifically designed for 2D animation and that is fully integrated in Toonz workflow. It is designed to be very easy to use, while retaining all the power of any particle system currently available on the market. It is a powerful tool to simulate, with custom-made drawings, a wide range of phenomena, such as rain, snow, sparkles and smoke.

The main advantage of this feature is that what usually is added in post-production affecting the whole rendered scene, can be done directly in Toonz on separate components, as the layers are not merged in the final frame yet. Besides the same operator that composite the scene controls the FX as well, and in case the director is not happy with the result, he can intervene at once on the scene, without retaking the whole animation.

Feature:
Anti-sliding Option
An interesting and funny-to-use feature allows you to prevent characters from sliding on the floor. Usually walking characters are drawn as cycles, and the movement is simulated either by moving the character or the background. In both cases, animators have no control on the feet position and this causes a clumsy sliding movement.

With Toonz you can define a point, named Hook, in the character?s walking cycle as a reference for the movement. For instance, you can use a hook to follow a foot position, so that when the character is used in the scene, its feet will be stuck on the ground in the right position.

 


 


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