The studio I work for bought Animate last month and I had the opportunity to play around with it a little bit.
Just a couple of things that I find annoying. Why do we have to buy TB harmony ($3000) to get textured brushes and text? It seems like it is a very cheap feature. Especially text. So you need an extra program for that. So TB animate isnt an all in one application, you will need text for credits, titles etc…
- you cannot open TB studio files…
- no text tool
- no textured brushes. I wonder if it would be possible to edit the shapes of the brushes? Like in illustrator? Seems to be a very easy feature???
- The curve editor is a bit weird, I dont see why 2D application dont just use the same curve editors as most 3D programs with handles that are easy to use and manipulate. Then again, the editor in TB is probably a bit better than the one in AE, cos that one is terrible.
- Export Quicktime, no H264 compression…Why???
I guess thats what annoys me a bit. Animate is a very nice program but is limited. It costs $900 and you have to pay $3000 for all this very obvious features… Also, is there any chance there would be an upgrade that would include this features?
Thanks!
Patrick
I would like to add something to that.
Apparently, TB Animate crashes when you use the Fill tool too often.
I also noticed that sometimes you cant undo stuff anymore…
Is there an autosave?
I understand if its too much stuff in one topic, but it would be nice to get an answer from a Toon Boom employee.
Thanks in advance!!!
First of all I think you are talking of Digital Pro not Harmony as the other software as is a complete solution not a standalone program at that price.
Also what seems “very cheap feature” for the user is not necessarily the case when you program it or integrated it into existing code. Any feature has to be evaluated on the need for the majority of users and the difficulty to implement it.
Studio and Animate (Digital Pro, Harmony, Storyboard, Pencil check) are based on totally different architecture so it’s not that obvious to mix the two technologies.
By the way there is no text tool in Digital Pro either.
The texture was judged as not essential but more as an advanced feature for most people. Animate was built with a simpler interface and featured set so that the learning curve was faster there had to be some things not offered.
There were some serious issues with the H264 so it was not offered until they are resolved.
If you do a search about the undo problem on this forum you can see some suggestions to try.
There is no autosave.
Hey Steve,
Thank you for your quick reply!
I hope you don’t see my comment as an attack of any kind, to be honest it is the best 2D program out there! And I adore the brush-tool!!! It’s only a bit unfortunate that I can’t use TB on its own.
Do you have any idea though why TB crashes after using the fill-tool? It happened a couple of times and is very annoying especially when you forgot to save for like 2h…
All the best!
Patrick
It’s a hard one to pin point but do you meet the hardware requirement, espacially for the graphic card? What platform are you on? Can you check your memory ressources as you paint and see it it keeps growing until it crashes or is it a specific action that you do that seems to trigger the crash.
You could try to take off the real time antialiasing in Preferences> OpenGL to see if it’s more stable.
What kind of drawing are you painting, many many lines or simpler images? Remenber that every line adds up to the processing needed since we are vector.
Do you paint with texture? If so how big is the texture file?
Do you paint in Camera view or Drawing view?
Hey,
I’m afraid I work on 64 bit Vista and apparently TB doesn’t support that?
But is it really a problem because Vista 64 bit emulates 32 bit when 64-bit is not supported? So that shouldnt make any difference?
I think it starts to grow and then crashes. The problem is solved when I restart the application…I have 4Gb memory and 4 core 2.8 CPU.
The graphic card is a NVIDEA Geforce 8800 GT
I paint in drawing view, no textures. I drew 20 frames, not too complex stuff…
thanks!
I will try to take off the anti-aliasing.