Hi everybody!
I was wondering exactly what the limitations of Toon Boom Express were. I was wondering what the use of a peg was. Are pegs the joints that would attach the lower arm to an upper arm in order to allow the bending at the elbow? Or are they more like lines that action would follow? Also they say there is no cut out animation. Is that because you are only allowed two pegs and a cut out character requires more then five usually? What would be considered a normal use of your two pegs. Like a camera and then you would animate most of the scene frame-by-frame with maybe one other thing making use of your other peg?
Also I was wondering how big your library could be. Or your templates. It could be as big as your computer would hold right? Also the workspace is still customizable?
Are all the buttons of Toon Boom Studio 4.5 in there? From pens, and erasers, and everything? Is it just the pegs, frames, and cut-out that set these two apart? Probably special FX too?
Are there any work arounds to these problems? I was thinking maybe the fact that Anime Studio 5 for $50.00 dollars was better had to be a myth.
Just to make sure, how are cut-out animations missing?
Sorry if this sounds repetitive, I was just trying to get all my thoughts together so people can explain it to me. There is not a lot of real in depth info on the web. Honest I’ve looked high and low for a person who could explain how to get simple value out of this product. I think it’s underrated and I can really get some juice out of this thing.
There is a timeline and some buttons and customizable pens though. So it should be able to make anything I think. Here’s a real good question. Does it have that tool where you create lines with points on it. And when you add points to the line you can then rearrange all the points in order to draw. I love that tool. Toon Boom Studio 4 and higher also have those little V’s that come out of them that you can kind of toggle with the curve. I don’t know what the V is called but it’s really natural for me to draw with the stuff.
Thank you for any information. I greatly appreciate it. Thank you.
Also can you make an animation with a peg and save it. And then open a new file and make a cartoon with two pegs, and then like import that first animation in there with it’s peg? I wouldn’t consider that much of a limitation. You could just do your scene in parts. Making a cut-out character would be kind of a laborious pain.
Thanks again.
Sincerely,
bRiMaTiOn
[edit]
P.S. This is a big thing that I’ve heard that got me all interested. I hear that typically a scene wouldn’t last more then a minute anyways.
Animators usually make a bunch of separate scenes and then put it all together in a different application like Windows Movie Maker. So I want to say that I know 1000 frames is more then enough. Would this effect my peg situation? Possibly the cut-out situation? Also when you have a cut-out character and you position him somewhere on frame 1 and then you move him to a different position in frame 10. When he moves to that location through 2-9 and you didn’t mess with those frames, it’s NOT considered tweening right? Tweening is usually a points moving to other points kind of thing? Like a shape shift. I think that if it has cut-out animation but no tweening, you still get an animated cut-out character that does a lot of the work (or like a ball that gets from one end to another) but you wouldn’t get that magical triangle turned into a star with minimal effort thing. Does placing a circle/ball in one position and then moving that cell to a different location later cause that ball to evenly move to that point? Thank you if you can clear anything up.
Hi,
I doubt it would be possible to do cut-out inside Toon Boom Studio Express for it has a limited amount of pegs and not animated element, which mean you can’t actually tween the drawings themselves. In that case you would need to do frame by frame animation with your puppet. It is possible but quite tedious to work with.
As for the scene length the information you got was good, it is somewhat rare that you would make a scene longer then a minute so 1000 frame is reasonable. You would miss the scene manager to put multiple scene together in a single project but if you have some other way to put together the exported scene you should not need much more then what the software provides you.
Concerning the Library there is no actual limit other then your actual hard drive space. You can put anything that you have in your scene inside the Library, though you can’t have more pegs then the limit in the scene so importing a template with pegs in a scene that already have the maximum amount is not permitted.
Express is a great tool for traditional animation where you would either draw on paper or in the software directly, for cut-out it is somewhat limited and you would have better use of Toon Boom Studio then Express for that type of workflow.
Best regards,
Ugo