Hi! I’m making an animation for school, and I’m having an issue where Toon Boom will crash on the same frame every single time I try to playback an animation.
Here’s a video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3s7wpNmbaZ4&feature=youtu.be
In the video, I wait for the character images to load, hit play, and about halfway through my block out, TB crashes without any error message. It just dumps me straight to my desktop. It crashes consistently on the same frame every time. However, when I’m scrubbing through frames, it works just fine. It only bugs up on playbacks.
Things I’ve tried:
I’ve tried deleting elements one by one to see if there is a particular element that’s causing the issue, but that doesn’t seem to be a solution. When I delete elements, it will crash less consistently, but it will still crash. I’ve tried saving all my elements as an object in the library and importing it into a new project, but that didn’t work either.
Project Info:
1280 x 720 24fps
Character Source File Info: 911 KB 3825 x 2063 PNG
Animation Length: 433 Frames (Crashes about half way through)
Toon Boom Studio 8.1.19172 Full Version
I’m new to Toon Boom. If you need more information about my setup, just ask. Help would be very appreciated.
-Aaron
What are the details of the computer system you are using?
At the top of the usual suspect list is RAM, not enough and the software chokes when it is maxed out. Think of it as how large your art studio space is. If you are working on a large painting or sculpture you need room to move and breathe and step back to take in the full scene.
Just looking at how slowly the images load there could be a bottleneck with your video/graphics card. Have you rendered a video of this sequence to see if the software still crashes? I know when you attempt a preview it crashes but you do not use the graphics card when rendering to file. It takes less hardware muscle to view a movie of the sequence.
At least attempting to create a movie file is a step towards eliminating possible sources of the problem.
Thanks for your response, Ampy.
Here’s my system info:
Windows 7 (64-bit)
16.0 GB of RAM
Intel Core i7-4770 CUP @ 3.40 GHz
Video: NVIDIA Quadro K2000
I just tried rendering the video, and the output works just fine. I think you’re right, it acts like a memory issue, but I feel like I should have plenty of RAM. I’ve worked on 5 times as much data in Photoshop and Maya, and I’ve never had RAM issues.
If it is a RAM issue, do you have any tips on working around this. I still need to import my backgrounds and a second character rig to finish this project. I don’t know how I’m going to do that if TB can’t handle even one of my rigs.
I think Toon Boom is very aggressive with RAM. Also, if you reach the limit of your RAM (16GB shows you are not under-equipped) when working with TB you are probably pushing the other hardware to its limit as well.
Whenever possible break up your animation into small scenes or pieces of scenes to keep them manageable. If you can isolate parts of this sequence and work on them separately then stitch them all together later in a video editor you will be in much better shape. When planning a movie try to think of everything in short segments. You may even have to change something so a scene can be broken into smaller pieces.
If you don’t have one already you really do need a separate video editing program. TB is not an all-encompassing product. I don’t want it to be, personally. I want it to be the greatest it can be at animation and not attempt to cover every aspect of making a movie.
Thanks for the suggestions. I’ll try dividing it up into separate scenes and composting my layers together in another program. That will probably get my through this project.
My entire animation is 18 seconds long, and my longest scene is 11 seconds long. Is ToonBooms max scene length capped at 18 seconds? What do I do for future projects that have scenes longer than 18 seconds which can’t be broken up?
Even without the backgrounds, TB still crashes playing back an 18 second single character animation, and that doesn’t bode well for my future projects.
I have seen longer movies made entirely with TBS and they could even have been done as one long scene. It may be everything you are doing at one time I don’t know. Studio is meant for relatively simple shorter animations. If you have time I would experiment with some simple shorter animations and see what you are able to do. The extra experience would not be time and effort wasted. What I have suggested will probably help but I am unable to pin point the exact reason for your problem or to come up with an absolute rule regarding Studio’s potential.
I’ll do some experimentation. Thank you very much for you help!
So I poked around a bit. I removed everything from the scene except one character, but it still crashed. Then I changed the resolution to my texture for my rig down to 717 x 387, which is so small, it’s completely unusable for my final render, but I wanted to see if I could fix the issue with smaller files. It still crashes in the same spot, despite the smaller file.
I also tried removing all the keyframes. Now it’s just rendering a still image for 300 frames and then crashing.
I also tried messing with the display preferences. I tried adjusting:
-Textures & Images Resolution
-System Memory Usage
-Smooth Textures & Bitmaps
No matter what setting I chose, it always crashes.
Do you happen to have any more suggestions? I really need the playback feature for this project since I’m working with dialogue.
Two things to consider:
A:
- Think of a way to break this up.
- Rebuild the pieces in new project files part by part. If you can copy/paste Export …all the better for time at least.
- Test the pieces in new project files as you add them.
B
If you want you can email the project file to me and I will see if I can get farther than you on my system and also take a look at it closer.
If you want to email it I’ll post a special email address I have created for this.
EDIT: I only have 7.1 of Studio …very sorry
I would open a Support Ticket as well.
No worries. I’ll open a ticket. I’ll either get this sorted out tonight or give up on TB and switch to animating in Maya. Thanks for your help.