I am very interesting in doing some animation work, but my background is that of film directing and editing, and I cannot draw well. I am wondering if there are libraries availalbe for download or purchase where I can use a stock of elements to create animations.
I am very impressed with Studio and wonder if I can use it in this way?
Andrew
Cartoon Solutions characters can work, and work well. I’m working on a project with one of their characters who I imported into Toon Boom and have been animating with for some time.
They have a couple of characters rigged for Toon Boom and will have more as time goes on. If you can’t wait that long, let me know and I’ll try to explain the process of importing and rigging from their Flash files. It helps a lot if you have Flash, of course…
Thanks, yes I decided to try it out by downloading the .fla file for a character, saving it as a .swf, then importing into Toon Boom. The symbols were all over the place, though, so it didn’t look so convenient to use that way.
There is so little already designed for Toon Boom, that I would not want to wait, for sure.
Basically, I’m left with the dilemma… why not just animate them in Flash, rather than import into Toon? And the only clear answer I could come up with is that Toon has the camera placement/movement control that Flash does not, which makes a big difference. Or can you do that sort of effect in Flash as well?
Being a non-drawer, I don’t need and would not use the drawing tools in Toon, so I’m strictly looking at manipulating stock characters to decide which software to use for a good workflow.
Thoughts appreciated…
Andrew
Not bad, but certainly no where near the library that cartoonsolutions offers.
Hi Andrew,
Toon Boom is currently working in partnership with cartoonsolutions to provide more Toon Boom Studio templates.
In the mean time let me share a trick to solve the problem of having all the pieces around in the drawing view (note that the pieces should be in the right place in the camera view).
Export only the character pose you want from the fla file. I usually copy one of the symbol pose into a new project.
Then export from flash but only one frame (no animation at all). If you need to do so, make your character symbol a “graphic” symbol.
Import this swf into Toon Boom Studio. Note that since there is no animation, none of the element should have any pegs attached. You should only have a bunch of pieces that may not be at the right place in the drawing view.
Export your project as swf from Toon Boom Studio (export the time line current scene).
Re import your swf into Toon Boom Studio and the pieces should all be at the correct place in the drawing view.
Hope that helps.
Cheers,