Learning Toon Boom (Patreon)

So I've started learning Toon Boom, approximately one month behind the rest of the team, and so far so good from watching a series of agonizing tutorials and then getting practical help after setting everything up incorrectly. Having sunk my teeth into this, I can see why Pbn felt a little daunted about building Banana Republic rigs in the program - the process is a lot more complex than rigging in Flash.

However! It's also substantially more powerful. You can't tell by looking, but this little guy is complete from this facing and could be fully animated without me having to redraw anything but his hands on the occasion. I made him simple so I could get away with mistakes and poor practices, but it looks like Toon Boom will support fairly elaborate characters.

I was in a stream last night with PieToons, watching him work in the program, and TiaraWhy has been talking to me as well. I think once I get the hang of this, the actual process of animation will be both faster and more elegant. So far Flash doesn't seem to compete on any level - and Toon Boom hasn't crashed on me yet!

In other news we're experiencing a technical problem with Patreon. It seems not be taking pledges correctly; the system is behaving as though we're still in July and it's applying people's July budget limit to August. That's eliminated roughly 75% of our pledges for this month so far. I sent an e-mail to Patreon on Monday and they haven't responded yet, but hopefully they'll get it cleared up soon!

But that aside, Toon Boom is looking good! We'll be faster, faster, faster - and an animation like Gym with its noodle arms and lack of lines will be much, much easier to produce.