Toonz Goes Open Source | Hacker News Reader

Toonz Goes Open Source

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337 pointsdoppp44 comments

Toonz is one of the massive 'enterprise' animation software suites, and it used to have a price to match.

But frame-by-frame cel animation - which involves weeks, months, years of tedious drawing - has been comprehensively disrupted by upstarts like Anime Studio (http://my.smithmicro.com/anime-studio-pro.html), which uses bones and inverse kinematics to produce quality animations quickly and easily.

Then there was Creature House's legendary LivingCels - the animation version of Expression (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creature_House_Expression). Imagine something as capable as Adobe Illustrator, but with a more intuitive interface and simpler workflow; then imagine using it to create complex animations using natural media brushes. That was a big development in 2002 (some predicted it could displace Flash), until Microsoft acquired the company, had no idea what to do next, and thus quietly killed a revolutionary product.

Aside: the original Creature House version of Expression is still available as a download from Microsoft (http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=3124...). The Mac version is PPC only, but the Windows version works flawlessly in WINE on Mac and Linux.

Is there a Windows version of the LivingCels plugin available for download? Also does the Mac version work through Rosetta?

LivingCels was a standalone product, with a (theoretical) expiry date. The Mac version never expired, but was occasionally buggy and would unexpectedly crash. I was never able to test it through Rosetta. The Windows version was stable, but needed a 'workaround' to avoid expiring. As the software was in beta at the time of the MS acquisition, the manual was incomplete, but enough is there to be able to fully use the software.

A number of animation studios in Hong Kong and Japan were very enthusiastic beta-users, so I guess it's been 'battle-tested'.

Here's a working download link for the Mac version: http://forums.digitalmedianet.com/cgi-bin/displaywwugpost.fc...

And, for an idea of what it could do, an episode of French TV show Micro.Info with a segment on LivingCels: http://micro.info/emission/emission.php?Id=156

The Windows version - particularly one that doesn't expire - may well be impossible to obtain. Although, you could always contact me, I might have a copy somewhere ;-)

> But frame-by-frame cel animation - which involves weeks, months, years of tedious drawing - has been comprehensively disrupted by upstarts like Anime Studio (http://my.smithmicro.com/anime-studio-pro.html), which uses bones and inverse kinematics to produce quality animations quickly and easily.

I'd hardly say Anime Studio disrupted anything

It's more like 3D suites replaced high end FBF animation, and Flash + Toon Boom replaced low end FBF animation

In Japan, hand-drawn animation is still king. They use a lot of specialized software to cut the costs though. Then there are Korean studios which produce relatively cheap hand-drawn animation for both Japan and the West.

In a lot of ways, FBF animation has never been disrupted so much as just temporarily displaced by other techniques for reasons of efficiency. The animator still has to make good design decisions up front so that the figure construction works and objects move in a perceptually believable way. Everything else - whether it's rotoscoping or tweening or something else - assists, but doesn't aim to truly emulate the thought process that a traditional animator uses, so you get different results that are often more mechanically precise but less interesting to watch.

Animation isn't subject to camera blurs, but since mechanically precise movement is so boring to watch animators have always utilized motion and frame blurs as stylistic expressiveness.

http://animationsmears.tumblr.com/archive

Given how cumbersome and glitchy Adobe's 'content awareness' algorhythm is, there's not much help for animators via software tools for that type of motion (in 2D, for 3D the general trend seems to be realism but 3D animation software has more than enough options for stylistic choices of surreal motion).

thx for the quick intro to the world of 2D animations. Most of us on HN are not familiar with this but we're creative people and I'm sure many others just like me, would love to use these tools someday.... someday...

If you are interested in 2D animation software there are a few others that are worth mentioning. These packages are usually either vector based or raster based.

Of the vector based I recall:

- Anime Studio

- Toon Boom Studio/Harmony/Animate

- Macromedia/Adobe Flash/Animate

- Synfig Studio (Open Source)

Of the raster based:

- Celsys Retas

- Toonz Harlequin/Bravo

- TVPaint Animation

There are some others in both categories but I don't remember them right now. Feel free to add to the list.

There's also Pencil2D[0] which open source.

[0] https://github.com/pencil2d/pencil

There's also VPaint, an open source animation program (currently in beta) for Windows and Mac.

The description on their site: "VPaint is an experimental vector graphics editor based on the Vector Animation Complex (VAC), a technology developed by a collaboration of researchers at Inria and the University of British Columbia, featured at SIGGRAPH 2015. It allows you to create resolution-independent illustrations and animations using innovative techniques."

http://www.vpaint.org/

Blender, recently improved its grease pencil tool, which was used for only quick 2d sketches in a 3d scene: http://aligorith.blogspot.com.ar/2015/12/grease-pencil-news-...

Krita has a beta Animation tool too https://krita.org/item/second-animation-beta/

Tupí is an open source alternative: http://www.maefloresta.com/portal/

It is now under the KDE umbrella.

Hello,

I develop a 2D procedural mesh and skeletal animation tool called Creature: http://creature.kestrelmoon.com/

Check it out here.

https://www.animatron.com - online, vector based, exports to video, svg, svg+smil, js+dom (html5), gif

disclaimer: I work there

Negative points: a) Not Open Source.

Still, tried signing up on the free account to see if it's any good, as there's some old PostgreSQL training things in Flash that would be useful updated...

b) Account sign-up doesn't work. Typing in email address, then clicking the "CREATE" button... goes forever. The little circle thing just spins and spins. Waited several minutes, then gave up.

Oh well. :(

> Aside: the original Creature House version of Expression is still available as a download from Microsoft (http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=3124...). The Mac version is PPC only, but the Windows version works flawlessly in WINE on Mac and Linux.

The file is a .sit archive of the mac version of the program. I was unable to expand it with stuffitexpander on windows, and since it's the PPC version it will not run on my Mac. (might try rosetta)

The Windows version of Creature House Expression 3.3 is here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=312...

Thank you so much for posting this!

Kawakami has been deeply concerned about the declining Japanese animation industry. Since he has been involved with Studio Ghibli and Studio Khara he knows the industry quite well. Also as CTO of Dwango he knows quite well about technology and the open sourcing stuff could be done only by him.

Bravo Kawakami!

Sounds like you're from Japan?

FYI for readers here, Dwango has been leading efforts to revitalise Japanese Anime, including Anime Mahon-Ichi, a series of animated shorts produced with a creative focus in lieu of commercial viability.

I think you meant Nihon Animator Mihon-ichi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Animator_Expo

How difficult would be for a beginner to start using it for hobby?

I had the opportunity to mess around with Toonz a few years ago. It's actually fairly easy to use, you could be productive in a few days with it. However, the problem is that frame-by-frame animation is incredibly time consuming. I'm not saying that to dissuade you from pursuing it, but just don't go in thinking you'll be able to animate an episode of Futurama in a month.

the video on the tunes sight has bones in it. so it doesn't use keyframes?

If you want to just mess around with 2D animation, check out Spine. It's for games, but I found it very useful for quickly visualizing some of the concepts I read in animation books.

Here's a bit more info: http://www.cartoonbrew.com/tech/toonz-software-used-studio-g...

I couldn't find infos on that anime anywhere, mind sharing a link?

Are you referring to the one in that image right next to Futurama? That one is called The Wind Rises and here's the trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imtdgdGOB6Q

I'm curious how this (OpenToonz) will differ from Toonz Harlequin and Toonz Bravo. Also, curious what will happen to Toonz LineTest and to Story Planner.

Unimportant but confounding - They have one of the oddest logos I have ever seen. What is it? Please help.

Cartoon dragon face?

It's the outline of a cartoon wolf. The same wolf in this boxart: http://www.toonz.com/htm/products/prod63B.htm

Good info, thank you for the post. Like others, I'm eagerly waiting for the release to try it out.

From the screenshots, it looked to be Windows-based. I wonder if they support other platforms. Curious about language, build steps... Well, we'll see next Friday!

Toonz dates back quite far, so it's probably C++ relatively deeply tied to Windows APIs.

Many years ago it's had Linux and IRIX versions (Toonz 4.6): http://www.toonz.com/htm/products/46productline/prodtoonzreq...

So there is chance it's might be still fairly cross-platform.

Oh, cool. That means they must have had some platform abstraction layer, and that sort of thing almost never goes away—I'd say high chance it's still there, if perhaps not updated. Porting it could be a lot easier than expected. We'll see in a few days. :-)

Looks like they are using Qt, and there are already some efforts [0][1] trying to compile it under Linux.

I haven't played around with it deeply, but it seems to run on WINE just fine, too.

[0]: https://github.com/opentoonz/opentoonz/issues/34

[1]: https://github.com/opentoonz/opentoonz/pull/51

Anyone here in the animation industry used this before? Looking forward to March 26th!

I wonder whether deep learning techniques have been applied to cartoon drawing.

Unfortunately, when I search for "deep learning" and "cartoons", I only find cartoons about deep learning :/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paperman

I'm not aware of anything serious, but there's some work in using Generative Adversarial Networks to generate anime profile pictures. Scroll down here: https://github.com/mattya/chainer-DCGAN

There's also some success in teaching recurrent neural networks to draw numbers or generate handwriting.

But all of these (even the anime profile shots) are very structured. "Creativity" is still a long, long ways away.

open source collaborative animu on github when?

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