Flash MX 2004 vs Toon Boom

[Renoir378]

Hi,

Does someone could tell me the difference between Flash MX 2004 and Toon Boom. I thought Toon Boom could only do animations but I have recently seen games made in Toon Boom. Does it mean that Toon Boom also has actionscript? I guess Flash has more possibilities because it costs more and it is used by more people. I do not know of any Toon Boom boards to ask the question.

Thanks,

Renoir

[goliard]

Hi,

I've got ToonBoom -- it's a great program, but it doesn't have Actionscript. You can use an importer to import ToonBoom animations directly into Flash MX so you can add interactivity to it, and possibly sound. The visuals for the games you mentioned were probably developed in ToonBoom, then imported into Flash.

HTH

[ddobson]

Toon Boom Studio is a great tool for doing traditional animation work - it uses an exposure sheet metaphor for timing, the drawing space rotates like an animator's work table, and it has an actual camera system (Flash forces you to move the ARTWORK around in the workspace and scale to zoom, where TBS lets you actually move the camera across and through the scene.) Its got solid lip-synch tools and a cel-collection approach that's superior to the Flash folder/library structure in some ways. But its sound handling isn't as flexible as Flash's, and it definitely doesn't do actionscripting - the process is usually to do the animation stuff in TBS, then import the scenes and/or images into Flash to add interactivity.

[Renoir378]

Thanks for the info. Now I see that Toon Boom is not a replacement or a competitor to Flash but more a complement. Does the file size of Toon Boom animations about the same than Flash or is it bigger?

Thanks,

Renoir

[ddobson]

You've got the idea - it's definitely a complement to Flash, not a competitor. Both tools have their strengths, and they interact pretty cleanly (you can import Flash into TBS and TBS into Flash.)

Toon Boom publishes as a Flash document, so it's pretty much the same thing in the end. Toon Boom isn't quite as space-efficient as Flash - drawing vectors are sometimes "layered" and treated as separate drawing objects with invisible bounding lines rather than "absorbed" into the surrounding area, it doesn't reuse drawings across scenes when you import them individually, and it generates keyframes for EVERY frame in the scene. All of these things add bytes, though I don't think it's enough to worry about (certainly minimal baggage compared to audio) if you need Toon Boom's capabilities. On my last project, I started doing some manual cleanup of the extra keyframes and consolidating duplicated drawings, and ultimately decided the space savings wasn't going to be worth it.