Scribble Kibble is a show about animation.
This episode explains the major differences in switching your animation program from Flash/Adobe
Animate to Toon Boom.
If you’re starting out and wondering which program to learn, listening through this may
give you the knowledge to make that choice.
A lot of 2D studios are moving to Toon Boom, so if you plan to work at a studio it is probably
what you should learn first.
Many animators insist you should switch to Toon Boom no matter what.
However, there are things Adobe does better than Toon Boom, just like there are things
Toon Boom does better than Adobe.
Pros and Cons.
I’m going to start with the cons of using Toon Boom.
Expensive.
For half the price, you can create animations that are just as complex - if not more so
- by combining Flash with After Effects.
At that price you get the entire Adobe suite with drawing, video editing, and audio editing
programs.
Whereas Toon Boom all you can do is animate.
Toon Boom doesn’t work well with other programs.
Good luck exporting a SWF that works in After Effects.
Plan on doing all puppet building, animation, and camera work in Toon Boom.
Pretty much expect to do everything art-wise in Toon Boom as much as possible - any other
workflow is frustrating, time consuming, takes up lots of hard drive space, and sometimes
simply doesn’t work.
Toon Boom animations must be broken into scenes.
It forces you to approach animation like a professional production with rough cut audio
and a storyboard split into shots before you begin animating anything.
And unlike Flash, you can’t simply click from scene to scene.
You have to save, close, and open each scene individually.
Then, you have to export every finished scene.
To put them together in a final animation you need a video editing program.
Need.
The only way to avoid this is by reimporting exported shots into a new Toon Boom scene.
Nobody recommends this.
As far as I know, you have to update puppets manually.
It’s not simple copy paste and override like in Flash, which is really easy to do
with multiple documents open at once.
To change a Toon Boom puppet you have to update the puppet piece and then drag and drop it
onto the old one in every single scene.
Big file sizes.
Every shot in Toon Boom is as big as the entire project in Flash.
So if your animation has 30 shots, the file size will be at least 30x larger than Flash.
Animating on a crappy laptop in Toon Boom will only work for beginner animators.
Expect to get a desktop PC with hard drive space when your Toon Boom animations start
to be a few minutes long.
Poor documentation.
Fewer tutorials and resources.
The guides on Toon Boom’s website assume you have the most expensive version, so you’re
constantly getting tips on how to do things in a different version.
It’s hard to know what you can and can’t do between versions.
You become constantly frustrated you can’t afford the highest tier.
That said, if you’re coming over from Flash there are some things you will find absolutely
amazing about Toon Boom.
Way better drawing program than Flash.
Your art doesn’t magically get better, but you’ll suddenly find you don’t have to
redraw lines much.
You can draw in styles that would be difficult or impossible to do in Flash.
Better organization than Flash.
Puppet animation is much less tedious because you don’t need to click inside nests of
symbols to do things.
Drawings are linked, so in Flash when you would normally copy the frame and have to
color it again, in Toon Boom you change one drawing and it updates everywhere else that
piece of art appears.
There is a cutter tool for cleaning up lines.
There are coloring options that let you color entire sequences of animation all at once.
Better onion skin controls.
Overall better animation environment.
Each layer has a separate line and color layer within it.
You will never worry about coloring over your line art or lining over your colors ever again.
Color picker works on anything on your screen, even stuff outside Toon Boom.
The most expensive version has deformer and mesh tools for puppets.
If you’re an Adobe user you have to pull out After Effects to do that.
The most expensive version has a node view, which gives you god-like powers for puppet
rigging and compositing effects onto your animation.
I expect in the comments some people will say Toon Boom has linked color swatches and
a camera layer and an asset library, yatta yatta, but Flash has those as well.
They don’t count as uniquely great things in Toon Boom.
Overall, if you plan to use the top level of Toon Boom then it’s worth it to switch,
but if you can’t afford that then you’ll get more art power out of Adobe Creative Cloud.
If all you have is $25 to your name, then Toon Boom and Adobe Animate are pretty even
on the playing field.
It’s a really tough call to make.
If you’re using Flash now, do you really want to re-learn everything you know?
Not even the shortcut keys are the same in Toon Boom.
It’s a frustrating and long transition, and I can’t promise at the end of it you’ll
feel like you made the right decision.
Some animators feel they did, and some ultimately switch back to Flash.
Another thing to consider is that if you are a long time Flash user who regularly incorporates
After Effects, it’s not worth it to switch (if you don’t have to for studio purposes)
because you lose all of the power of After Effects.
If you want to use After Effects with Toon Boom you have to export a .mov with alpha
channel for every single set of items you need separate for every single shot.
And when you’re animating at 4K resolution, that’s a stupid amount of hard drive space.
It can be done, but it’s lengthy and complicated compared to exporting an infinitely scalable
vector SWF out of Flash, which you can do for every layer in a shot all at once via
SWF archive.
Those are the major differences between Toon Boom and Flash.
Both are great animation programs and I recommend either.
If you want tutorials on how to use either of these programs, I have a playlist of free
tutorials below and a Complete Course Class to learn Adobe Animate available on my website.
I’ll post a tutorial on switching from Flash to Toon Boom soon, so stay tuned!