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Animalympics 7 & 25 cleanup - Tatyana
I've recently been messing around with Toon Boom Harmony again and I needed to get some practice in as well as a better understanding of how to actually use the pencil tool for inking and cleanup. To that end I decided to take an old animation drawing from my collection and do an ink-and-paint job of it in Harmony to see how my effort compared with the actual animation cel. This is the end result.
This was actually a good test because the ink job on the original cel was a little sloppy whether because of skill, size (the character art is about three inches tall) or rush work so my efforts benefit tremendously in comparison. I had all the time I wanted and could work digitally which allowed me to get much finer detail control and of course the ability to "undo" endlessly to correct mistakes. The one thing I would need more practice with however is to make sure that my line quality doesn't fluctuate from frame to frame which would cause a bit of line boil to occur. I also need practice to make sure that the line art flows consistently from one frame to the next, -a hard thing to judge in this case since I don't have all the frames that make up this sequence.
Anyhow, here's two frames of Tatyana from her original gymnastic routine as if I were the ink & paint department.
This was actually a good test because the ink job on the original cel was a little sloppy whether because of skill, size (the character art is about three inches tall) or rush work so my efforts benefit tremendously in comparison. I had all the time I wanted and could work digitally which allowed me to get much finer detail control and of course the ability to "undo" endlessly to correct mistakes. The one thing I would need more practice with however is to make sure that my line quality doesn't fluctuate from frame to frame which would cause a bit of line boil to occur. I also need practice to make sure that the line art flows consistently from one frame to the next, -a hard thing to judge in this case since I don't have all the frames that make up this sequence.
Anyhow, here's two frames of Tatyana from her original gymnastic routine as if I were the ink & paint department.
Category Artwork (Digital) / Miscellaneous
Species Mustelid (Other)
Size 1200 x 675px
File Size 239.7 kB
The production of 2D cartoons is still too broad for there to be a definitive answer to that question so the best I can do is say that Toon Boom has probably spent the most advertising money promoting their software for the production of television cartoons. Toon Boom actually purchased Animo in 2009 and the more cynical people would quote Judge Doom from Roger Rabbit "So I could **DISMANTLE** it!!" Animo hasn't been updated since and can no longer be purchased. Pencil animation will always have a place in high end animation production but that kind of work isn't what it once was, limited now to the realm of commercials, theme park promotions, and the occasional spot in movies. Overseas is another matter though, -there's still many productions going on and one of the most interesting uses Toon Boom in conjunction with in house developments, -take a look on Google for Sergio Pablos "Klaus" movie and be impressed.
Toon Boom Harmony is expensive-ish but still comparable with other production software and quite a lot more affordable than such tools were ten years ago. Harmony runs about $2000 but there are sales and promotions that let you buy in for much less (I paid $1300 and got Harmony Pro & Storyboard Pro 4 together). The interface is what it is, I can't say that it's bad, just that it's not an Adobe product and so it doesn't share a common UI design language that most people are familiar with. Like any software there's a learning curve and it handles some things a bit... uniquely. I would MUCH prefer to see the curve editor brought in from After Effects, but what can you do?
I think Adobe was just a victim of their own success. Flash was originally developed by Macromedia in the form of a program called Director which was used to make CD-Roms in the 90's, and the software evolved into a webpage based media development platform and never really underwent a complete re-invention to discard the roots of the original development pipeline. As such Flash was always a bit of an outlier from the regular suite of Adobe products thus insuring that compatability between Flash and Adobe's native vector art program Illustrator would be compromised. Flash's chief strength was it's ability to be used by anyone from the novice to the professional, but that historical software legacy was a boat anchor keeping Flash from really evolving into a tool that would match what feature animation studios were able to use. Toon Boom however started off as a software tool by USAnimation and was from the get-go oriented around film and TV production and so has always been useful for camera moves, special effects, high resolutions, and video editing elements. Adobe eventually suffered a lot from the software weaknesses of its historical legacy which had tons of backdoor vulnerabilities which hackers and malicious software exploited, particularly because at one point the Adobe Flash Player was installed on something like 96% of the entire Windows computer base in operation. That reputation is what prompted Adobe to rebrand Flash as "Adobe Animator" but it's still built on the Flash base and so has similar quirks and weaknesses, although by this point in time the use of the software is more towards non-interactive media development (plenty of cartoons still use Flash / Animator as their tool of choice) but as time goes by Toon Boom has been edging into the Flash market because of the superior art tools that make production faster and more lustrous in comparison. For example Flash character rigging can't hold a candle to the flexibility and ease of visual effects that Toon Boom can do.
Flash's main assets these days is it's super-cheap, tons of resources to help people learn, and a long legacy of productions which showcase what you can do if you really know your way around the software. The one thing Flash has over Toon Boom is that an extraordinary amount of work was put into it to make it a full interactive software language capable of making games and other tools. That's something which is still used extensively in pre-packaged formats (not like older webpage applications).
Toon Boom Harmony is expensive-ish but still comparable with other production software and quite a lot more affordable than such tools were ten years ago. Harmony runs about $2000 but there are sales and promotions that let you buy in for much less (I paid $1300 and got Harmony Pro & Storyboard Pro 4 together). The interface is what it is, I can't say that it's bad, just that it's not an Adobe product and so it doesn't share a common UI design language that most people are familiar with. Like any software there's a learning curve and it handles some things a bit... uniquely. I would MUCH prefer to see the curve editor brought in from After Effects, but what can you do?
I think Adobe was just a victim of their own success. Flash was originally developed by Macromedia in the form of a program called Director which was used to make CD-Roms in the 90's, and the software evolved into a webpage based media development platform and never really underwent a complete re-invention to discard the roots of the original development pipeline. As such Flash was always a bit of an outlier from the regular suite of Adobe products thus insuring that compatability between Flash and Adobe's native vector art program Illustrator would be compromised. Flash's chief strength was it's ability to be used by anyone from the novice to the professional, but that historical software legacy was a boat anchor keeping Flash from really evolving into a tool that would match what feature animation studios were able to use. Toon Boom however started off as a software tool by USAnimation and was from the get-go oriented around film and TV production and so has always been useful for camera moves, special effects, high resolutions, and video editing elements. Adobe eventually suffered a lot from the software weaknesses of its historical legacy which had tons of backdoor vulnerabilities which hackers and malicious software exploited, particularly because at one point the Adobe Flash Player was installed on something like 96% of the entire Windows computer base in operation. That reputation is what prompted Adobe to rebrand Flash as "Adobe Animator" but it's still built on the Flash base and so has similar quirks and weaknesses, although by this point in time the use of the software is more towards non-interactive media development (plenty of cartoons still use Flash / Animator as their tool of choice) but as time goes by Toon Boom has been edging into the Flash market because of the superior art tools that make production faster and more lustrous in comparison. For example Flash character rigging can't hold a candle to the flexibility and ease of visual effects that Toon Boom can do.
Flash's main assets these days is it's super-cheap, tons of resources to help people learn, and a long legacy of productions which showcase what you can do if you really know your way around the software. The one thing Flash has over Toon Boom is that an extraordinary amount of work was put into it to make it a full interactive software language capable of making games and other tools. That's something which is still used extensively in pre-packaged formats (not like older webpage applications).
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