Miyazaki or Takahata could make a movie animated with Sharpie markers on Post-It Notes, shot under a webcam, and do something brilliant, but some people would immediately be posting in forums : "what brand of webcam did they use to shoot it ?" "what size Post-It Notes ?" "Thin tip Sharpie or Thick tip Sharpie? (I heard for some scenes they used a thin felt-tip pen. These people don't understand that the tools don't make the magic, the artist makes the magic. This is like when people used to ask: "what kind of pencil does Glen Keane use to animate?" If I can get those kind of pencils, my animation will look like Glen's animation.".
Many people really believe that if they get their hands on the same software that Studio Ghibli used, they can make the same quality of animation as Studio Ghibli. As you could expect everybody lost their minds with excitement"Īnd here is something that demonstrates a huge problem among the fandom : why did they lose their minds with excitement ? Because of the false belief that software makes the movies look the way they do. "the announcement that the software that Ghibli used to scan and color their movies was going to be released for free. Either way, if Opentoonz becomes something that more people can add to their pipeline then I guess there's still something to be excited about. Sometimes it feels like these programs never make it into the hands of the people who can use them the best (still don't know why no one's checking out Krita). I suppose its kind of nice to see creators make such use of this kind of software. This software is already being used in a feature film!? Not even Blender, one of the most popular open source applications, can boast that yet. Heres's a video of people sketching with a few of the brushes.Ī new interface and drawing tools maybe nice, but the thing that really surprised me was this. They even added a horizontal timeline (which doesn't affect me since I actually like xsheet-like timelines, but I know other people weren't happy about it), and a lot of these features are said to be added to an official release soon. This is a version of the software made by a group of animators using it for their own projects. The most endearing part though is that, yes, it does have proper drawing tools now. The interface seems to be mostly the same, but just a little smoothed out there's less bezel on all the menus. It seems that the program has made it all the way to a 1.1.3 version and has changed some things. A big brush set might not be necessary, but it seemed like the only drawing tool they had was a strange vector brush.Įither way, I sort of ignored the program for the most part, until recently when I decided to take another look. And, in all truth, I think I was a bit bitter that this program was getting so much attention when Krita, a well known drawing app, had just added a pretty cool, easy to use, animation feature and no one was talking about it ! (I'm still kind of bitter about that! Do people not like it because of the brush lag or what?)But the thing that turnes me off immediately was the lack of drawing tools. To start off, the little bit of interface we did see seemed incredibly cluttered and hard to manuever, and later on there were dozens and dozens of reports of crashes and strange bugs. While the idea of such a well known company releasing their software for free sounded pretty good, I was a bit skeptical of it. As you could expect everybody lost their minds with excitement, and when the software finally dropped there were tutorials made by fans up within an hour. A little over a year ago the announcement that the software that Ghibli used to scan and color their movies was going to be released for free.