Softimage Announces Toonz 4.4 for Linux

Softimage Announces Availability of Toonz Version 4.4 for Linux available at the end of this month. Press release is here. Could someone give a few words about Toonz please? I wonder when Softimage will port their XSI & DS products for Linux.

Comments

What Toonz is...

[FattMattP]

IIRC, Toonz is a digital compositing and ink & paint system for cel animators. It allows an animator to import a series of drawings from either files or via a scanner with a document feeder. Once imported or scanned, Toonz finds the edges of lines that you have drawn and thickens them up a bit. You can then composite cels much like you do in traditional 2D cel animation and assemble your characters over your backgrounds.

You can also set fill points for your drawings that fill in closed areas such as a characters body or face, etc. These fill points can be animated over time via keyframes.

This won't be a cheap product, BTW. Expect to pay SGI prices.

It's not distro specific! Hooray!

[PsychoKiller]

A great deal of programs have been announced for RedHat Linux, and I think it's great that this company is not saying that you have to run it on a specific distribution.

Re:It's not distro specific! Hooray!

[be-fan]

Well, it just makes their life harder. Maybe if companies started requiring a certain distribution, we'd put an end to all the incompatibility between distributions. I mean, I don't seriously think they're going to allow you to use any "Bob's custom distro" here. This is a company who certifies the hardware you're running the thing on, and for something as quirky as the various Linux distributions, I'm sure they'll narrow it down to one or two that they'll support.

Toonz

[Kreed]

Is basically a slightly (Perhaps more then slightly) outdated 2d animation compositing package, when I was working at warner bros. it was under consideration but was dropped in favor of Animo, a much more fully featured animation/compositing package. I think animo is easier to use as well, Dreamworks uses it exclusively for all their productions... Tom

Yes, Microsoft sold Softimage to Avid in 1998

[cpeterso]

Here's the story: "Microsoft sells SoftImage to Avid buyer: Deal worth a total of $285 million"

Microsoft has sold SoftImage to Avid Technology for $285 million, four years after it bought the firm for $130 million. SoftImage specialises in creating special effects for the film industry, and has been bought by Avid to broaden its portfolio. The company makes video editing systems, which also sold to the film and to the TV industries.

The terms of the agreement are that Microsoft will receive $79 million in cash from Avid, will get $93 million of Avid's shares with a ten year option to buy more, and keep nine per cent of Avid's shares. Intel owns seven per cent of Avid shares. The other components of the deal include subordinate notes worth $5 million and sale of stock to ex-Microsoft employees.

About Toonz and what it is :-

[cOdEgUru]

Toonz is a complete 2D animation system designed to meet the rigorous production criteria of the modern cel animation industry while preserving the integrity of the animator's work.

Toonz allows artists to capture the emotive quality of their hand-drawn art. It also simplifies and accelerates the production process allowing artists to fast forward through the more tedious steps like inking and painting and focus more on the creative aspects of production. Artists can then augment their work through advanced digital compositing and special effects.

Toonz is used extensively in feature film, commercial, video, and interactive media productions.

Designed by cel animation artists and producers, Toonz is an exposure sheet-driven digital ink and paint program that precisely traces the steps of traditional hand-drawn animation, while giving you all the efficiencies and options of a digitized medium.

Toonz behaves like a traditional toolset, but contains powerful tools that automate time-consuming tasks. Easy to learn, animators can become productive almost immediately. Flexible database management tools provide quick and easy access to your work. Recent improvements include faster render and preview speeds.