Toon Boom Studio - Stop Motion

Toon Boom is one of the leading software for 2d, it is widely used in productions from Family Guy to Princes and the Frog. Toon Boom is not only dedicated to professional 2d animators but is software is so flexible that we could use it for stop motion. Recently we contacted them to find more information on their contribution to stop motion and they were very approachable and kindly provided us with a run through of how to use Toon Boom Studio for stop motion. Thank you Toon Boom from Stop Motion World we really appreciate it, hope you guys find this as knowledgeable as we did.

Please visit their website for more information and take a look at their variety of products.
www.toonboom.com

Stop-motion Animation

Stop-motion animation has been around since animators first realized that all it took was to nudge a clay figure, puppet or object and take a series of snapshots to produce the illusion of motion. In this digital age, the process has only become easier and more fun as it is now possible to mix in 2D animation.

Toon Boom Studio 5 has a newly integrated image capture feature. An intuitive and easy to use image capture window allows you to set up and capture all your images. It is as easy as plugging in your recording device, be it a digital, video or web camera, fixing the settings in the software, keying out the background and taking the snapshots.

Characters and Stage

Before you begin, it is important to gather the characters that you intend to use and to set up a stage on which to record your stop-motion animation.
Gathering Your Characters

When deciding on characters, it is best to look for or create figures that have ball and socket joints for full rotary movement. Just like a cut-out puppet, you want to be able to move your principal character at the shoulders, legs, knees and elbows if possible. If you choose to create or use characters that have less mobility, your animation might look a little stiff, which is not necessarily a bad thing if this is the look you are going for.

Setting Up Your Background

Depending on whether you would like a 2D or 3D environment, you will have to set up your background accordingly. If you prefer a 3D background, then you would treat the elements in the same manner that you treat your stop-motion characters. If you would like a 2D cartoon background, then you will need to set up what is known as either a blue or green screen.

A blue or green screen is a solid coloured piece of fabric that can easily be selected and blocked out in the software. This process is known as colour keying. You can then superimpose another background, be it a 2D drawing created in Studio 5, a 3D photograph or a piece of video footage.
An important element to consider when setting up either a green screen backdrop or a stop-motion setting, is the lighting. In the case of a green screen, soft, flat lighting can be the key to making the material look smooth and shadowless. The fewer variations in tone, the easier it will be to key out the colour later on. Lighting does not necessarily mean a multi-lamp setup; a well lit room with natural daylight can often work best.

Image Capture Settings

Before you start, be sure that your image recording device is plugged into your computer and turned on. Follow the camera manufacturers instructions on how to connect the camera to a computer. It is recommended for the stop-motion image capture process that you support your camera in a fixed position by either using a tripod or some other mounting system. The camera must be rigidly fixed, any movement of the camera, shaking, vibration etc. will affect the captured images, the only items which should move are the items on the stage.

Setting-Up the Image Capture Options

To set up the software for image capture:

1. From the File menu, select Acquire > From Capture Device.
   The Image Capture window appears.
2. In the Options section, under the Source tab, find and select your recording device from the Device drop-down menu.
3. From the Source drop-down menu, select Full-Resolution Photo, if it is available for your recording device (some devices, such as webcams may not allow for this option). Otherwise, if you would prefer to take faster, lighter images for a rough test, select Live Preview.
4. If you are using a scanner with a WIA driver (Windows Image Acquisition), the Resolution drop-down will be enabled. From the list, select the resolution at which you would like to scan your images.
5. If you wish to smooth out some of your colours, check the Noise Reduction option. If you wish to capture more detail, leave this option unchecked.
6. Click on the Properties button.
   The Camera Properties window appears.

This is an example of a typical Camera Properties window.
NOTE: The Camera Properties page is different for every capture device. The information displayed on that page comes from the device itself and will therefore contain different options for each device.



7. Most of the settings that you see in the Exposure section are set manually on your camera. If you change a setting in the software, such as the ISO, it will be changed on your camera. If you change a setting on your camera, it in turn will be changed in the software.
8. In the White Balance section, play with the options from the Mode drop-down and select the one relating to your lighting set up, or until the colours in the preview window displays evenly balanced colours. Make fine tune adjustments with the colour sliders.
9. In the Focus section, use the Near and Far increments to bring the preview image into focus. For greater focal detail, use the Left, Right, Up and Down buttons to move around the Zoom Preview rectangle in the preview window. When you find a good section to examine, such as an area of high-contrast, press on the Zoom Preview button to view that section in detail. Use the Near and Far increments to make finer adjustments.
10. Click on the Close button.

Light Table and Onion Skin

The Light Table feature for stop-motion image capture can be used in two different ways: as a light table or as an onion skin option. As a light table, it can be used to display a series of images, such as JPEGs of a walk-cycle, behind the live image in the preview window. This can be useful if you wish to use a template for the stop-motion poses that you need. As an onion skin option, the preview window would display the live image with the one that was captured just moments before.

The different uses of the light table are based on the layer selected in the Layer drop-down menu. Choosing the same layer as the one you are capturing the images on will enable the Onion Skin option. Selecting any other layer will serve as a reference when capturing images for the stop-motion. Only image (bitmap) layers, as opposed to drawing (vector) layers, will appear in the drop-down.

To use the Light Table feature:

1. From the Layer drop-down menu, select the layer that you wish to see in the preview window.
2. If the images that you are capturing do not have the same ratio as your TBS project (for example 16:9 instead of 3:4) the Aspect Ratio drop-down menu will be enabled. Select the ratio option that suits your needs.
3. Use the Opacity slider to control the transparency of the image being seen through the light table or onion skin.

To use the Light Table feature as an Onion Skin option:

1. Capture the first image without specifying the Layer to be used as a reference (i.e. in the Light Table section, the Layer drop-down menu is set to Disabled).
2. Once the first image is captured, go to the Layer drop-down menu and select the layer that the image has been captured on.
3. If the images that you are capturing do not have the same ratio as your TBS project (for example 16:9 instead of 3:4) the Aspect Ratio drop-down menu will be enabled. Select the ratio option that suits your needs.
4. Use the Opacity slider to control the transparency of the image being seen through the light table or onion skin.

Capture Features
Auto Capture

Although some motions are easy to record by posing and reposing a figure while taking snapshots in between each movement, others are not. The Auto Capture feature allows you to automatically record movement where it might be difficult to press the record button in rapid succession, such as when trying to capture a ball dropping, or the opposite, over a long period of time, such as when recording a time-lapse sunset.
To use the Auto Capture feature:

1. In the Auto Capture section, select a number of increments from the first drop-down.
2. From the second drop-down, select the units (msec, sec, min, hour, day).
3. When ready, click on the Start button.

Preview Window

If you feel that the preview window in the Image Capture window is not large enough for you to see all the details of the elements in your scene, you can expand the preview to full window size by clicking on the Show/Hide Capture Options  button.

Colour Keying

One of the ways that Toon Boom has ensured greater flexibility for your stop-motion projects, is by including the Colour Keying feature. With this feature, you can easily remove the background around your character and replace it with an hand drawn background instead.
In order for the Colour Keying feature to work, it is essential that you place a solid coloured fabric behind your character so that it hides anything else that might appear in the camera frame.

1. To key out your coloured background:
   If it is not already open, from the File menu, select Acquire > From Capture Device to open the Image Capture window.
2. Click on the Keying tab.
   
3. From the first drop-down menu, select the Keying type. It is recommended that you select the type that shows the most sensitivity to your background. This might not be obvious until you pick the colour that you wish to key out. You can gauge sensitivity by the amount of dancing pixels seen in the preview window.
   • Chroma Keying (YUV) - YUV is a colour model (like RGB or CMYK) that encodes a colour image or video taking human perception into consideration. It allows transmission and compression errors to be more efficiently masked by the human perception than when using an RGB-representation. Mainly choose YUV if your recording device conforms to certain YUV standards.
   • Chroma Keying (RGB) - The RGB colour model is an additive colour model in which red, green, and blue light are added together in various ways to reproduce a broad array of colours. RGB is a device-dependent color space: different devices detect or reproduce a given RGB value differently. Thus an RGB value does not define the same color across devices without some kind of colour management.
   • Luma Keying - Luma corresponds to the brightness in an image i.e. the "black and white" portion. Luma is typically paired with chroma. Luma represents the achromatic image without any colour, while the chroma represents the colour information. Converting the output of a camera into luma and chroma allows a video system to optimize its performance for the human visual system, since human vision is more sensitive to luminance ("black and white") detail than colour detail.
4. Click on the Pick Colour button.
5. Use the eye dropper to select your background in the preview window. If there are some unavoidable highlights and shadows on your green screen, try to select a mid-tone area. The selected colour will appear in the swatch area beside the Pick Colour button.
   Your preview window should come alive with dancing pixels.
6. If you selected Luma Keying as the keying type, you can also check Luma correction to help even out the image so that it is easier to extract a drawing from the background.
7. If you selected either of the chroma keying types, check the Matte option if you wish to render the preview window achromatic. This option can make the keying process visually easier by seeing the selected portion being reduced to black and the keyed out portion being reduced to white.
8. Check the Hide Background option, if you wish to see which part of the image will be rendered transparent.
9. Play with the Minimum and Maximum sliders until your background disappears into a solid white (or transparent depending on which options were selected).
10. If there are still green areas remaining, try selecting one of the effects from the drop-down menu and chose the degree of Effect Intensity until you see a clean white or near clean white background in the preview field.
    You should now be ready to capture images for you stop-motion animation.

Image Capture

This is the easiest part of the stop-motion animation process. Simply click on the Capture button and watch your images being recorded as a string of frames along the timeline, on an Image Capture layer that was automatically created.

NOTE: if you are using a video camera, it will act as a still-frame camera; it will only capture the single images within its field of view.

To perform an image capture:

1. Set up your first pose and make sure that it is framed correctly using both the preview window and the recording device viewfinder.
2. When ready, click on the Capture button.
3. Reposition your character and/or other elements on your stage. The smaller the movements, the smoother your animation will be.
4. When ready, click on the Capture button.
   At this point, your Timeline should look something like this. Each frame represents an image capture.
5. Repeat this process until you have finished your motion sequence.
6. When you are finished, click the on the Close button.

Capturing Images in an Existing Layer

Instead of recording all the images that you need in one go, you may decide to chop up the action sequences into different recording sessions. However, you may notice that each time you close the Capture window and then start up again, the software automatically creates a new Image Capture layer.

To add image captures onto an existing layer:

1. In the Timeline or Xsheet view, right-click (Windows) or [Ctrl] + click (Mac) on the empty cell where you would like the new captures to begin.
2. From the pop-up menu select Import Images > From Capture Device.
   The Capture window appears.
3. Continue with the capture process as detailed above.

Vectorization and Clean-Up

After finishing the recording of your stop-motion animation, you might notice on closer inspection that your character was not as cleanly keyed-out as you would have liked. The fastest way to solve this problem is to do a clean-up. However, a clean-up cannot be executed without first converting your bitmap image sequence into vectors with a bitmap texture fill.

To vectorize and clean up your image sequence:

1. In the Timeline view, select and right-click (Windows) or [Ctrl] + click (Mac) on one of the cells in the Image Capture layer.
2. From the pop-up menu, select Convert Element to Vector.
   A new Drawing layer should appear above your original layer with the same number of cells now converted into vectors.
3. In the Timeline view, select the first cell of the Image Capture layer.
4. In the Drawing view, use the Contour Editor  tool to delete or move vector points until you have a clean outline around your bitmap fill.
5. Scrub through your animation to check for any anomalies in the contour of your character.