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Overview of the Seven Step Tutorial

I have no one but myself to blame. Nicktoons Network will be running an animation festival in August, and they're accepting entries of animated shorts 10 minutes and under. This is exactly the type of thing I'm looking to do with Toon Boom Studio, but entries must be submitted by May 31st. There's simply no way I'll be done mastering this program before then.

Maybe it's for the best, though. By this time next year, I not only want to be fluent with Toon Boom Studio, I want to be using it in ways that other people are not. If that happens, my entry for next year's festival will be more to my liking. Right now, though, my column here is still about the tutorials.

Before I get to the seven lessons included with the software, I want to look back at those available online. In October (yes, it's been that long), I took a brief look at a couple of the online tutorials. Why only a couple? Because that's all there were. Unfortunately, we're six months on, and there aren't many more. The Quick Start Tutorials I'm covering here are now online, but they come with v3, so you should already have them. A couple others that were for v2 and v2.5 only have now been updated to also support v3, including the great Advanced Multiplane Scene Planning tutorial. Seeing that multiplane scene planning is one of Toon Boom Studio's greatest abilities, I recommend all users check this one out. Undoubtedly, I'll be looking at it in detail in an upcoming column.

For now, however, lessons. The seven included with your purchase are:

1. Drawing
2. Painting
3. Lip Sync
4. Scene Planning
5. Color Effects
6. Mask Effects
7. Drawing Scene Planning

Each of them is presented the same way; you launch Toon Boom Studio, then select "Toon Boom Studio Help" from the Help menu. This will launch the help system in your browser, but make sure you have something other than Safari installed; I was only able to open the help system once before the links quit working in Safari and I was presented with a mostly blank page. The system worked fine in Firefox, however, so ever onward.

Selecting "Tutorial" in the Contents menu pulls up the lessons listed above. You'll need to keep your browser open to see what to do, then flip back to Toon Boom Studio to execute their suggestions. This makes for a messy screen, but you work with what you get. You can print the lessons using the Print icon, but it seems to only print step by step. To print all of these lessons in one shot, you'll want to print Chapter 2 of the PDF User Guide included with your purchase. You may, in fact, want to print the entire guide, provided you're willing to use up nearly 450 pieces of paper. If not, Command+Tab will be your new favorite key combination.

Although the tutorials will help beginners, they're not designed for beginners. The first one, for example, has you using the various drawing tools to draw an ant. It teaches you to use the Ellipse tool to draw an oval, then tells you to use the Bezier handles of the Contour Editor to reshape the ellipse. It doesn't, however, teach you anything about Bezier handles, it just assumes you know how use them. To really use them effectively, you'll need to access the manual (chapter three, in case you're looking). Since that's in the same online Help system as the tutorial, you'll probably want to have at least one of them printed off, as mentioned above.

My complaints aside, the tutorials are actually pretty good. They cover some very powerful tools in Toon Boom Studio, and they're also very important tools; the ones that are the reason you bought this software to begin with. The early ones take you all the way through one project, which I always find more useful. The later ones are tacked on to make sure you know about the tools that weren't necessary in the earlier tutorial project. It'll take you a while to get through all of them, and it's a good idea to go through a couple more than once. What I'm not sure about is how well they educated me for projects I'll be creating from scratch. Of course, I was never good at that to begin with. Ask my algebra teacher; I had no problem figuring out new algebraic concepts in the examples, but the moment I had to apply them to slightly different problems, forget about it. Another D for Hiner.

I'm not going to dwell on that, however. I could have two printed manuals, a how-to DVD and one of the Toon Boom Studio developers standing behind me, and I still wouldn't learn the software as well as I would by just diving in. And so, diving in I will do. I'll no doubt refer back to the tutorials, and yes, I'm going to print off the entire manual to keep handy. I'll start having some examples to throw up, too, hopefully. You'll notice a lack of screen shots this time, and that's because they all simply would've mirrored what you can find on Toon Boom's site. In my next column, I'll take their lessons, one by one, and use them to create my animations, which will hopefully then become the basis for my cartoon. In other words, this project is about to get a whole lot more helpful to me, and hopefully to you, as well.

And who knows? If all goes as planned, it won't take me six more months to do something useful.

All Entries:

1. Project Introduction
2. Tutorials and Online Help
3. Overview of the Seven Step Tutorial

Learn more about Toon Boom Studio.