Toon Boom Technologies is offering an advanced preview of never-before-available character animation platform for Web-based designers and creators at this week’s Macworld Expo in San Francisco.
Toon Boom Studio 1.0 is coming to Mac OS X. The product is designed to bring many of the capabilities of Toon Boom’s high-end product, USAnimation, to the designers and creators of character animations for the Web. Toon Boom’s USAnimation V5 product is used for managing large scale, high-volume projects. Its used by such studios as , DreamWorks, Film Roman, Warner Bros., Klasky Csupo, Paramount Pictures, Mercury FilmWorks, Sunwoo, Cuckoo’s Nest, and many others.
“Software developed for OS X delivers high-end capabilities and sophisticated tools allowing for unlimited creativity, free from technological constraints,” Toon Boom spokesperson Lisa Krug told MacCentral.
It will provide a richer set of capabilities than presently available from existing Web-publishing products, including 3D scene planning, 3D camera moves, a color palette, power paint, and paperless drawing functions, according to the folks at Toon Boom. What’s more, they add that Toon Boom Studio 1.0 will offer a complete digital workflow to maximize quality and productivity and “to free storytelling from technological constraints.”
“Mac OS X’s robust underlying UNIX architecture has enabled us to develop and port our software in a speedy and easy manner,” Toon Boom CEO Jacques Bilodeau, said. “Through OS X features like embedded multi-tasking, the Velocity Engine, and Quartz, we have seen significant speed enhancements to our application on the Macintosh platform.”
Toon Boom Studio 1.0 takes advantage of the Aqua interface of OS X and the Quartz graphics engine. For example, its paint and drawing tools rely on the Quartz technology to give the user optimal quality in drawing and coloring a vector animation. It will use QuickTime for Flash playback, media import, and, in the next release, real-time playback. Toon Boom also integrates with such Web publishing programs as Adobe Photoshop, Adobe GoLive, Adobe LiveMotion, Macromedia Flash, and Macromedia Dreamweaver.
Toon Boom Studio will begin beta testing next month. A finished version is due by the end of this quarter. If you register at the Toon Boom Web site, you can participate in the public beta test (there’s a version available for Mac OS 9) and benefit from promotional pricing when the product ships. No price for the final version has been announced.
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