The great thing was, from there we could go straight to layout.
#Toon boom animation 2d pro#
We would storyboard with Storyboard Pro from Toon Boom. Everything from storyboarding through to ink and paint was all based on the Toon Boom pipeline. The other extremely important part of it was Toon Boom – the whole pipeline is built around Toon Boom Harmony. We called the tool ‘Klaus Light and Shadow.’ What came out of the partnership was this insanely intuitive tool that works in real-time and it allows artists to do an amazing amount of work in not much time. Not just vector drawn lines, but even bitmap lines.
#Toon boom animation 2d how to#
Les Films Du Poisson Rouge figured out how to derive a tracking system from drawn lines. It was Marcin’s recipe and Les Films Du Poisson Rouge’s proprietary solutions – we merged those together. They had been developing tools for 3D and 2D for a long time. This is when we reached out to Les Films Du Poisson Rouge. That proof of concept was incredible, but it was a time consuming process. If you pull it off, the question is, is this something you can do, because you’re a freakin’ mad-genius or can we actually teach other people to do this, too?’ The irony was, I was reaching out to people in the US and Canada and Australia and the guy who had the solution was in the next room.
Then I said, ‘I’m going to give you an actual shot, where a character walks into a room and there’s a different set of lights. I said, ‘Well, I’m not sure how you’re doing this, but let me give you something more complex.’ So I gave him a walk cycle, and he knocks it out of the park. So I sent him an animated head turn – about 16 frames – and he brought back this thing that looked 3D. So I said, ‘Well, the simplest thing I can think of is a head turn.’ I said, ‘I don’t know what the hell I’m supposed to learn from this!’ He said, ‘Give me something to try it on. And then he comes back and says, ‘I think I figured this out.’ He sent me a bunch of images of cubes and spheres overlapping.
Meanwhile, one of my employees, Marcin Jakubowski, who at the time was a concept artist, was looking over my shoulder saying, ‘Hmm…give me a try’. I found there were a lot of semi-automated attempts at doing it, but they didn’t tend to give you that control. I spent months reaching out to different programmers and developers. I always knew there was someone out there who had a solution for this. Sergio Pablos (director, Klaus): I knew I wanted to demolish the limitations that we traditionally had with 2D animation. The quest to do something different in 2D Sergio Pablos.