This is not to say that Toon Boom is a direct competitor for Macromedia. Think of it more as a cooperative or supplemental application. In fact, Flash MX ships with a special importer for Toon Boom Studio files, similar to the importer Flash uses for Electric Rain’s Swift 3D files. Although you can use Toon Boom to produce standalone SWF files, it’s likely that your cartoons will be integrated with files/interfaces produced in Flash.

Toon Boom Studio is specifically an authoring environment for character/set animation, and thus does not offer the complex interactivity provided by Flash MX. Toon Boom Studio’s interface is well laid out and fairly intuitive. The environment is very conducive to character animation. All of the tools are fairly self-explanatory, so much so that it is easy to get started without looking at the manual or any tutorials. It basically consists of two modes: Drawing and Scene Planning. Drawing is where you assemble your character animations Scene Planning is where you animate your sets and cameras. The Drawing View window is the primary interface and functions as a digital version of a traditional cel animator’s light table. This is somewhat like Flash’s onion-skinning feature, but with an “exposure sheet” that refers to drawings rather than frames.

If you are at all familiar with traditional cel animation, this setup will make you feel at home. The toolset is refined and simple and features everything you need to draw, paint, and edit your characters. The “pen palette” offers a number of selectable drawing points that can feature variable widths and different smoothing settings. Of course, the variable widths only work in conjunction with a pressure-sensitive pen and digital tablet. I would highly recommend purchasing a digital tablet for use with this application, if you do not already own one. It is simply too difficult to try to draw with a mouse, especially in an application like this where you are trying to achieve a more natural, artistic look. The Scene Planning mode is much more complex than the Drawing mode, and will take some studying of the manual to figure out.

Toon boom studio 6.0