Product Reviews

Toon Boom Studio is a specialist animation application that's been around for a number of years. Version 4, just launched for Windows and Mac, extends its abilities in a number of ways, from improvements to the working methods to more output options.

Unlike Flash, Toon Boom Studio is aimed squarely at animators and illustrators, particularly those creating cell-style illustrated animations. Rather than worry about ActionScripting and the other things that get in the way of traditionally drawn animation work, Toon Boom's approach is to put the animator's needs firmly in the spotlight.

It provides onionskinning in both directions (forwards and back from the current frame) to help you get placement and movement just right. It also supports pressure-sensitive pens and graphics tablets, so you can paint variable-width brush strokes as you create your animated illustrations. In a nice touch, the Rotary Light Table feature lets you turn your work to an angle that's more appropriate for your drawing motions, then turn it back to the proper angle when you're done, just as if you were working on movable paper on an art desk. If you don't have a pressure-sensitive pen, you can still use the brush tool.

For more general drawing needs there are a number of other tools in addition to the Brush. The Polyline tool provides beziér-like drawing features, and the Rectangle, Ellipse and Line tools create editable primitive shapes. If you prefer to do your drawing in Illustrator you can import your artwork, and there's an option to export a drawing to PDF.

Multiple layers let you split your graphic elements across different working planes, handy both for working with complex objects and for creating multiplane animation effects.

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These layers can be shown individually or together, and even the way the layers and timeline frames are shown can be changed to give you different ways of working.

Fills can be created with gradients, including ramps with different opacity settings, allowing seriously interesting effects to be made very quickly. And anyone attempting cell animation illustration will learn to love the software's ability to match fill sections across multiple frames automatically.

Lip-syncing, one of the most tedious tasks in drawn animations, is made simple with the Lip-Sync feature in Toon Boom's Sound Element Editor window. This analyses imported sound clips and assigns one of eight different mouth shapes to each sound. You can of course make your own choices if it gets things wrong, but for clear clips it does very well. You then match your own drawn elements to the set of example mouth shapes, and Toon Boom automatically maps your work to the right places in the animation.

This just scratches the surface of what's possible. Path animations let you move objects over time, with ease-in and ease-out tweaking and 'pegs' to alter the path direction at different points. As well as animating objects with this, you can create cameras that pan to follow the action too. Colour transforms, clipping masks, bitmap animations - the list goes on.

The interface is extremely flexible and reconfigurable; palettes can be docked as resizable panels, and the whole main window interface can be switched between a number of different settings according to what kind of work you want to do. This is both clever and useful, but there are numerous aspects of the interface that take getting used to.

You can create documents that are sized for small embedded animated snippets right up to HDTV 1080 and even '2K'-size canvases for film-level productions, all at the appropriate frames-per-second settings. The higher-end sizes aren't particularly suitable for normal Flash export, but you can export to QuickTime as well, and take your work into professional DVD, broadcast or even cinema production environments if required.

There's no argument that it is a mature, professional tool, but it is still quirky. Still, if you put the time into learning it you'll have an amazing time creating sophisticated cell-drawn digital animations.