Toon Boom Experimentation

In our last refresher workshop of the year with Stan, we went over the basics of "Toon Boom" as the last time we had used it was back in first year. Toon Boom is great for digital animation and crisp, clean animation. I did a couple of tests in it to see how the 'paint and trace' methods of turning my line art into a vector image would effects my sketches.

These were the images I used:

Adjusting the paint and trace tolerance and settings turned the lines into this:

The vector is useful in that it allows you to enlarge or shrink the artwork without effecting quality, and you can easily drop in colours and gradients that fit perfectly with the edge and without worrying too much about broken lines. However, because it doesn't record the 'greys' and other values in my lines, the result is two-tone and high-contrast which is the opposite of what I want my lines to look like. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the results of the method and think it would make a very unique art style sometime in the future, so I coloured it in too.

Finally, I tried out a simple tail-wag cycle for my Spirit, using only a mouse in Toon Boom, so it is very rough! The tail doesn't move how I want it to in my next animation tests, but it was a fun start for a little workshop exercise.

All-in-all, I enjoyed the program and can see it's benefits, but it's not what I'm after for my final film, so I'll be sticking to pencil and paper and Photoshop.