Actually, ToonBoom Japanese language Edition's distributor caused a heavy loss per a year.
Macromedia Japan provided Flash 4 professional in 60% off price than U.S. regular price and their business become success.
That's no surprise to me.
I own a license from Toon Boom animate Pro, and this software has great features but also great defaults:
Good:
- vectorisation process from a scanned paper is really really reaaally amazing!
- it has nice basic 3d features
- the vectorline and it's antialiasing are amazing good quality (as well for realtime emulation as for output)
- bitmap emulation is not bad (but surely doesn't match tvpaint's true bitmap )
- ...
BUT negative:...
- The pencil/brush tools are not flexible like Stylos/ Manga Studio
=>you can not 'join' 2 vector- lines easily
=>'thinckening' or bending a line is very difficult because of the ancher-points
=> changing a pencil-line into a brush line can change the line thickness (Horrible!)
=> no fading in /out available for pencil-tool
because of these negative points, i can understand that japanese people are not attracted by Toon Boom, because it's pretty unusable for making anime. (except if you start from paper ).
You can already use RETAS and TVPaint both with ! （by export consecutive PNG, tiff, eps ... ）.
It's now almost a year that i work on a combination TVpaint (blue pencil) => exportation layers into psd to Manga Studio for inking=> exporting back to TVpaint for coloring.
I am pretty happy with the result but it's a slow process, because i can only check the black inked animation after importing back from Manga Studio into TvPaint.
That's the reason why i dream to have vector pencil tools from Manga Studio into TVPaint.
***especially for these features***:
-joining 2 lines (end-point from line1 with start point from line 2 and vice/versa)
-bending maded lines (1 fixed point, 2 fix points, free start and points, move entire line)
- erasing intersections
-thickening part of lines linked to penn-pressure
or like in Toon Boom by dragging brush-contours (but in a more flexible way, because it's not user-friendly if you have a lot of ancher points)
There is already a 3 point-spline vector tool integrated in tvpaint. (very handy! i use it a lot. Especially nice when linked to line fade in/out)
Maybe this tool can be developed for getting those features?
I regret that the answer say, "Non".
Gurren Lagann the movie human action part only drawn by paper and pencil.
They scanned it high resolution（over 2,144×1,160 pixel for next generation Blu-ray）but keep bitmap.
Aaaaaaaaargh!! :'(((((
By the way, i really like also Denno Coil (really nice story!), Diebuster(Great Gainax!) and Getter Robo (especially these ova's from your link with the Black getter! huhu!
)
This "bitmap" scene from the human action part in Gurren Lagann made me also think of Ashita no Joe II
Great thanks for all this very interesting info, Ten Zero!
.
）.
)
.