Bataille Royale!

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Permalink Reply by Russell Huettner on July 27, 2008 at 1:05pm

I've worked a little in toon boom. The interface seemed like a good set up to transition old school traditional animators into the digital world. But thats not me so I didn't really stick with it. A while back I looked into what big studios use for animation. I found two programs, Animo and Retas. Animo didn't have any demos so I couldn't really try it. But Retas did have a sample program to download. I was mostly interested in how it ink and paints a drawing, but it was confusing so after a while it quit that too. I knew enough about photoshop and after effects that in the end it was just easier to stick with what I know. But I am interested to see what you think of the two programs. I hardly ever hear anyone talk about Retas in american animation.

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Permalink Reply by goodjesse on July 28, 2008 at 12:26am

I would be interested to hear what you would suggest from the two for some one who has no interest in actually drawing in the program. I am currently using toonboom but I only use it to compose. I scan or shoot all of my frames and do any cropping or adjustment in photoshop, using toonboom simply to paste it all together. I still haven't explored many of its features.

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Permalink Reply by Justin "Denny" Furlong on July 28, 2008 at 1:03am

In your case, Toon Boom will be very helpful. The node-based compositing system is one of my favorite components; right behind the multiplane camera. The biggest limitation of Toon Boom is that you can only draw in vector mode, so my lines come out too sharp and pure. I'm playing around with texture brushes right now to try to eleviate my problem. Thus far, Toon Boom is the better compositor, Retas is the better drawing app, painting is of similar quality in both; to make this more challenging, I'm drawing multi-toned characters. I have to say that Retas has a better system for automating painting, but the stroke tool in Toon Boom yields a negligible difference.

The bitmap painting tools of Retas are intriguing, but you can always airbrush in other, less expensive software. The ability to automatically soften selected areas is helpful when drawing multi-toned characters. Overall, except for the interface, I say the PaintMan portion of Retas holds the most value.

As far as interface goes, Toon Boom dominates. The custom workspaces have become invaluable to me. It's much friendlier than the cold exterior of Retas.

Anyway, I'm far from a conclusion at the moment, but let me tell you with certainty that Toon Boom is the superior program for monotone character animation. It also costs less, so that's a big plus.

I need soft edges in my life.
~ whoop

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Permalink Reply by Justin "Denny" Furlong on July 28, 2008 at 1:26am

Alright, to get soft line art in Toon Boom you need to cheat the system a little. What I did was create a new texture pen with a pure black square for the texture, then adjusted Gamma values accordingly. Of course, this wouldn't have been necessary if Toon Boom hadn't blocked Gamma adjustments in the regular pen tool.

Now I just need to figure out the best, easy way to soften edges between tones and we'll have a winner (using interface and availability of support as the tie-breaker).

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Permalink Reply by Justin "Denny" Furlong on July 28, 2008 at 1:40am

The best way I can figure to soften color transitions (without using a gradient, every digital animator knows why) is using the aforementioned texture pen in lieu of the stroke tool, but I'm working on other techniques.

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Permalink Reply by goodjesse on July 28, 2008 at 3:18am

Lol, maybe i wasnt clear enough with what i was saying. It definately sounds like toonboom is the friendlier program either way. All of my work is traditionally drawn and coloured so for the most part i am just importing complete single shots of hand drawn animation, lining it up, adding the music and exporting. I have done a little digital cel sheet making by using photoshop to digitally crop out characters with transparent backgrounds. I was just wondering if this other program you mentioned was easier for slapping pre existing frames together into a movie.
Additionally I would like to explore more in the future with digital cell characters and backdrops and with the multi plane camera stuff but I am having too much fun in the analog world right now.
If you are still considering doing some kindof toon boom class or training tapes or what not I would be quite interrested in the future.

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Permalink Reply by Justin "Denny" Furlong on July 28, 2008 at 3:30am

I understand what you asked, I was just trying to keep the post general so that other perusers could, potentially, find an answer. If I was unclear, you would benefit most in the future from Toon Boom's compositing tools.

As for lining up your art, have you tried just taping a peg bar to your scanner?

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Permalink Reply by goodjesse on July 28, 2008 at 3:20am

Also let me just personal thank you for being so helpful to this community. It seems you have really gone out of your way to inform other inspiring animators and to share and spread information for us all. FredRAW owes you a lot of respect.

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Permalink Reply by Justin "Denny" Furlong on July 28, 2008 at 3:27am

Thank you very much. I love the animation community, so I do what I can.

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