Toon Boom vs. Toon Boom Pro

It looks like we are going to stock our studio animators up with Toon Boom.

It also looks like we are going to go with Toon Boom Animate vs Toon Boom Animate Pro. The main reason is obviously the costs. The second is the lack of clearcut features that Pro will give us that we will not have in Animate.

Also we are making TINY sprites with this. First doing large art from concept and taking that concept into animation and creating sprites. It is a shame that we can not see what the animation will look like but I assume that we will be able to change our render presets somewhere.(?)

Has anyone used this to create sprites? will we be able to spit out multiple .png files?

anyone? how about this…

So one of the office eval copies… Toon Boom Animate has very pixelated splines. Infact we thought at first it was bitmap and not splines it is so pixelated.

my eval copy of Toon Boom Animate Pro has very high definition (1 to 1) splines.

Is this really a feature of the two? Because I can get high definition splines in any spline program. Splines that are not 1 to 1 when it comes to pixel ratio, the idea is blows my mind.

AH JEESH THIS IS THE WRONG FORUM.

How many damn versions of TOON BOOM are you guys making and selling?

Toon Boom Studio is only traditional animation and its 300 something bucks? You can’t even rig things.

infact it looks like you cant even rig images in Toon Boon Animate Pro.

Think I will have to go with Anime Pro.

Hello Eric,

We do our best to monitor the forums, but sometimes it can take a day to get a response. I apologise for any inconvenience.

Indeed, you have posted this in the wrong forum. However to give some of your answers to your questions:

We do indeed have many different products. We have a range of products, from consumer products for children up to professional products for studios. We try to fit people’s needs as well as we can.

Now as for the pixelated splines - when you say splines, do you mean simply the way that the brush strokes look when you draw them in the drawing view or the camera view? Or are you talking about the splines that show up when you hit Shift+F11 to show a control spline after animating an object? Or are you talking about something else? You could include a link to a screenshot that we could take a look at.

The interface comes with a feature called “Real-Time Antialiasing” that makes the images appear smooth, more similar to how it would look in a render. This option may be checked off by default, because real-time antialiasing can become cumbersome when working with large projects, and make the computer slow down. Maybe this is what’s making it look pixelated. To enable real-time antialiasing, go to Edit > Preferences > OpenGL tab, then under Real-Time Antialiasing, click the checkbox for “Enable”.

The other major factor when running any of our products is what graphics card you’re using. Make sure that you have all your drivers up to date for your operating system, or you could run into display issues.

You can rig in both Animate and Animate Pro. Perhaps you could take a look at the help documentation to further understand how to build a cut-out character in Animate. You can access the help documentation from the PLE version by hitting F1. In order to create a rig, you basically have to split the different body parts onto different layers, then order the layers in a hierarchy, then you can create a template from this that you can pull into any scene and animate with the IK tool or the Transform tool.

Animate Pro does have more features, such as a network (for organising your elements and doing compositing), and more effects. If you’re working on a production in a studio, you would definitely want to go Pro, so that you can use the network to organise your elements.

You can adjust the scene settings and resolution in Scene > Scene Settings. If you want to you can add a custom resolution to make your sprites, towards the bottom of the window where you can enter the x and y resolution. Then hit the save button and you now have a custom resolution.


Hope that answered some of your questions.

~Lilly