Toon Boom Studio version 2.5
by Rashad Redic

Toon Boom Studio is a professional level 2d animation system primarily used in film and broadcast. CG Focus reviewed Toon Boom Studio 2.0 last year, and gave it high marks for it’s easy to use interface and art tools. Toon Boom Studio 2.5 was recently released and this review will focus on the exciting new features added to the package.

Without rehashing the previous review, but providing an alternate perspective, I found Toon Boom to be very easy to get into, much more than competiting packages of similar quality. I found the learning curve to be fairly quick, especially if you’re a user of 3d software or have used tools such as Flash to animate with. It’s got a bunch of options for drawing and manipulating images and changing things over time. The great thing about software are the updates that more often than not, make life just a little easier, and Toon Boom 2.5 adds a few things users and newcomers will appreciate.

A neat new thing Toon Boom can do is scan and import images directly from any TWAIN compliant scanner. What’s even better is that you can also vectorize your scan drawing into something that can reshaped and manipulated in Toon Boom. The process is very straight forward, you simply select a cell in the Exposure Sheet, right click and Import and Vectorize from TWAIN. How easy is that? A dialog box pops up and gives you some choices on how to vectorize your image. I ran a few tests I found the vectorizing to at least be on par with Flash, if not better. Once back in Toon Boom I was able to go right to editing the scan with tools like the contour outliner. Too bad it seems to only work with one cell at a time, the ability to batch scan and automatically assign each image to a cell seems like it would be pretty useful for a studio environment.

The Sceneplanning mode has received an upgrade and you can do a lot more in it now. They’ve made it easier to retouch and alter drawings in the middle of animating now, by selecting a drawing element and frame in the timeline. As soon as a drawing tool is selected, you can begin drawing in the Sceneplanning mode.




The sound has also been improved and is accesible in many different sections of Toon Boom. You can scrub sound in the timeline and also play it back in Sceneplanning mode.

The Function Editor is where you can plot animation via graphs (also referred to as splines and curves in 3d terms). Here, you have the ability to create animations that would be difficult to time the traditional way. The Function Editor is now located in a separate window providing a more convenient way to access the toolset.




You can also do more in the Timeline now, such as being able to view separate Rotation, Scale, and Motion keys, and being able to paste keyframes, exposures, drwings, palettes and templates. You can also extend the exposure of drawings with copy/paste in the Timeline.

To sum it all up, the software is evolving in ways that should provide a more non restrictive workflow and allow people to work as they wish. Support for scanning is very welcome, and animators should enjoy being able to vectorize and place their art immediately into cels without having to go elsewhere to clean up the art. Sceneplanning mode is extremely robust and with the already easy to handle workflow, the overall additions will provide a good foundation for Toon Boom to build on.