Hi im currently doing a simple line character and when copying and pasting frames, also moving my character within the drawing view, toonboom is taking ages to compute sometimes a few minutes only to move a line 1 centimetre, ive tried flattening the mage but it hardly helps at all. im running a AMDathlon 4400+, geforce 7800 GTX and 1024mb ram. thanks - Adam
Hi Adam,
First thing you should do is making clones instead of duplicates. That should lighten things up. Also, you can try to export your animation and check the Size report button. There you will be able to analyse where in your drawings the problem could be. Simply scan through the frame to check if some specific ones are heavier then others and go to that frame to delete some stuff.
You can also try to optimize your drawings, they might have a big amount of points that are unnecessary. To do that simply select the drawings and go in Tool>Optimize.
If the problem persist make sure to send us an e-mail at techsupport@toonboomstudio.com with a zip of the project folder so we try to see where else the problem can be.
Best regards,
Ugo
I guess I’m still a bit confused about the brush/pencil tool and the benefit of using either. I read TBS help and saw where they made the point that the “BRUSH” tool uses a lot of memory/processing because of the preassure sensitivity feature. They actually recommend changing the brush to the pencil before painting.
My questions are …which actually uses the most memory?
If the Max/Min is set the same in the brush tool is it effectively the pencil tool? Will it use less memory then?
Below I see something a bit conflicting posted by the administrator…they claim the pencil tool is resource hungry. Don’t know which is right/wrong …but if clarified I may learn something here.
In particular, I use a Tablet-PC that does not employ WACOM technology. I have a Gateway.
So far …the big difference is that they do not support preassure sensitivity. However they are working with the vendor (finepoint) to release a driver upgrade that will support this feature. It does not bother me …because even when I use my WACOM tablet, with my style, I usually disable the sensitivity feature by setting the MAX/MIN to the same.
What I’m concerned with though … to optimize performance when using TBS … do I want to use brush or pencil tool? So far using the tablet-PC I’ve done all my work with the pencil will I be better off using the brush?
My analyze of the Brush and Pencil tool is as follows:
Brush tools takes less processing power to work with, I don’t know about memory, but I think don’t differ in size THAT much. This is from experience.
Advice (especially for you with slower computers). Use Brush at all times. Use Pencil only when you must.
The Brush tool paints up an easy to interprete filled shape while the Pencil draws a line with information about how the thickness of the line changes throughout the whole line. When the computer draws the graphics on screen a Brush (filled shape) is very easy to draw because it is not very complex information. A Pencil line is more complex because the application has to interprete and tween thickness information at many points throughout the line and when drawing the line on screen it must in fact sort of convert it to a shape anyway (for viewing purposes). This process takes a lot of computing time compared to Brush created images.
Also, using the fill tool is a better experience on Brush created images. It fills inside the outline strokes you see on the screen, while filling Pencil created images it fills inside the “inner stroke” of what you see, often leaving actual invisible gaps between lines and edges which the fill tool has a harder time interpreting. These gaps are not seen when looking at the image, but when you click on the lines you realize the ending points are not on the edge of the line but inside it.
I use Brush tool for all outlines.
I use Pencil tool for shadow separating outlines (because the “strokes” don’t show up in onion skin.) Draw a shadow separating line with a pencil using a dedicated shadow line color in the palette. When you’re done with painting your frames, just change the opacity of the shadow line color to 0 and you’ll understand why this is so great 
The actual line has no thickness, so there will be no gap between normal color and shadow color if you use a Pencil line to separate them.
regards Andreas
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