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No doubt most of you have heard about Warner Bros. new project of making 1,000 minutes of new Looney Tunes.

Here is a link to a short sample of what they are doing:

https://www.cartoonbrew.com/shorts/warn ... 75578.html

Bugs and Elmer do not look like they were animated in Toon Boom Harmony. Do you suppose Warner Bros. Animation used TVPaint?

Any thoughts?

GoChris

PS: I just noticed that Bugs' gloves are yellow!

Most of the animation is being outsourced to Canadian studios. From what I've been able to find out (I've been in communication with a friend who is working on some of these shorts) the final clean-ups and ink & paint are being done in Toonboom Harmony, with "film look" filters applied in After Effects to make it look less digital. I was told that some animators are working with pencil on paper for roughs , but those drawings are scanned into Harmony for clean-up.

"Bugs and Elmer do not look like they were animated in Toon Boom Harmony."

I think with either TVPaint or Harmony, if the approach to animating is to use classical frame-by-frame hand drawn animation technique then the results will look the same.
However, when the technique moves over to using rigged "2D digital puppets" in Harmony it's really a different type of animation ... it's basically like CG animation, but with 2D elements instead of fully rendered "3D" elements like in Maya. However, the new Looney Tunes shorts are hand drawn animation (albeit drawn on Cintiqs in Harmony) , not rigged 2D digital puppets.



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PS: I just noticed that Bugs' gloves are yellow!

They did try out yellow gloves on a few of the early shorts ... maybe just this one (?) , 'Elmer's Pet Rabbit' (the first cartoon where he is actually named on screen as "Bugs Bunny" )

.

The Looney Tunes short looks like it was made with a raster based
drawing tool. So I thought of TV Paint.

What fooled me were the After Effects filters. This cartoon does not look
like it was made with a vector based program.

Even though I use TVPaint, I try to make my cartoons look like they
are not digital.

Thanks for the info, David!

My guess is that despite being colored in Harmony, the actual animation was done in TVPaint. Harmony's frame by frame is mainly vector based, so you don't get the same results with vector drawing as you do with raster drawings.

VGmaster9 wrote: ↑18 Jun 2019, 04:47 My guess is that despite being colored in Harmony, the actual animation was done in TVPaint. Harmony's frame by frame is mainly vector based, so you don't get the same results with vector drawing as you do with raster drawings.

No guessing is required. I have several friends who are working on these shorts and they told me they are using Toonboom Harmony for animation, clean-up, and coloring. (although some animators are working with pencil on paper for rough animation, which is then scanned into Harmony for clean-up and coloring).

In an interview with executive producer Pete Browngardt and supervising director Alex Kirwan , they were asked:

"What animation tools do you use to produce the animation?"

Pete and Alex: "Toon Boom Harmony and good ol’-fashioned paper and pencil. It’s a mix of digital and hand-drawn, depending on the studio."


https://www.animationmagazine.net/short ... bits-back/

D.T. Nethery wrote: ↑18 Jun 2019, 13:29

VGmaster9 wrote: ↑18 Jun 2019, 04:47 My guess is that despite being colored in Harmony, the actual animation was done in TVPaint. Harmony's frame by frame is mainly vector based, so you don't get the same results with vector drawing as you do with raster drawings.

No guessing is required. I have several friends who are working on these shorts and they told me they are using Toonboom Harmony for animation, clean-up, and coloring. (although some animators are working with pencil on paper for rough animation, which is then scanned into Harmony for clean-up and coloring).

In an interview with executive producer Pete Browngardt and supervising director Alex Kirwan , they were asked:

"What animation tools do you use to produce the animation?"

Pete and Alex: "Toon Boom Harmony and good ol’-fashioned paper and pencil. It’s a mix of digital and hand-drawn, depending on the studio."


https://www.animationmagazine.net/short ... bits-back/

Of course, but it still would've been nice if they actually used TVPaint instead of resorting to paper.

Harmony does have very good bitmap drawing capabilities, too. It also has vector brushes that look like pencils, chalks, paintbrushes, etc.

Harmony 17, which was just released, has a new drawing engine which is much smoother and more natural to draw in than previous versions by the way. It feels as good as drawing in Photoshop to me.

TVPaint is still superior when it comes to bitmap brushes that can blend together and have a painterly look. But for linework and some natural media looks Harmony is right up there.

I am perplexed with the decision to go as far as producing an episode with the yellow gloves. This should have been rejected at the thought stage, let alone voicing that thought.

It is a odd idea to give Bunny yellow gloves, how does this go with an orange carrot?

mclinton wrote: ↑19 Jun 2019, 01:03 Harmony does have very good bitmap drawing capabilities, too. It also has vector brushes that look like pencils, chalks, paintbrushes, etc.

Harmony 17, which was just released, has a new drawing engine which is much smoother and more natural to draw in than previous versions by the way. It feels as good as drawing in Photoshop to me.

TVPaint is still superior when it comes to bitmap brushes that can blend together and have a painterly look. But for linework and some natural media looks Harmony is right up there.

This looks like it's made with TVPaint. If it is, would it be possible to make animation this fluid in the latest version of Harmony?

Starlight wrote: ↑02 Jul 2019, 12:09 It is a odd idea to give Bunny yellow gloves, how does this go with an orange carrot?

This is a lovely reference to Bugs' 1930s-40s shorts, when he had yellow gloves.

VGmaster9 wrote: ↑05 Jul 2019, 05:50


This looks like it's made with TVPaint.

If it is, would it be possible to make animation this fluid in the latest version of Harmony ?

There seems to be some misconception that the software is responsible for the skillfulness of the animation. The software (TVPaint or Harmony or Toonz or Flash/Adobe Animate) doesn't make the animation fluid or not fluid , it's the skill level of the animator + how much time was the animator allowed to spend on animating the scenes . You could take an experienced feature film senior animator who usually has a quota of 3 or 4 seconds a week when he is working on feature films and stick him on a television schedule/budget where he has to crank out 5x that amount of footage (or more) and you're not going to get feature quality animation out of the guy , but it might be pretty decent looking for television stuff . If you were to take an average jr. animator with less skill and experience and stick him on the same TV schedule you'll probably get the typical TV junk animation as the result. However if that same average, less-experienced animator was given more time to animate, allowed to make multiple revisions on their scenes (probably working under the supervision of the more experienced senior animator) the results will be good looking animation (and along the way the jr. animator's skill level grows.)

Please understand, I'm not saying that the type of software one uses is totally irrelevant (goodness knows I strongly advocate for TVPaint , I love using it) , but software isn't the primary thing that makes animation look fluid.
You can get good , solid, fluid looking hand drawn animation using almost any software that allows you to draw the animation frame by frame on a timeline . To me, TVPaint is the best available software for this purpose and you can see numerous examples of very fine hand drawn animation done using TVPaint. On the other hand, if we search we could also find plenty of examples of flat, stiff looking animation made using TVPaint, but it's not the fault of the software , it's because the animator did not have the skill or the amount of time needed (or both) to produce good looking animation .

* I don't know for sure what software was used for the cartoon you posted above , but for what it's worth I recognized several names of animators listed on the credits (most of them work at Titmouse , a studio which uses Adobe Animate/Flash and also Harmony) and one of the animators is someone I know very well from having worked with him at Walt Disney Feature Animation ... since leaving Disney he has worked in Flash (now Adobe Animate) , but recently has been asking me questions about TVPaint. He told me he has never used TVPaint or Harmony , only Flash, but he's interested in trying TVPaint because of all the good things he's heard about it from former Disney colleagues like me , Aaron Blaise, Tony and Tom Bancroft, etc. But my point is , this guy has done all of his digital 2D animation in Flash, he told me he has never used Harmony or TVPaint, so what does that tell you about this short because he is one of the credited animators and most of the animators on the short work at Titmouse which is well-known for using Flash (and recently they've moved into using Harmony , too ... from what I observe in the industry over the past few years a lot of the established Flash-based studios like Titmouse, Bento Box , Six Point Harness are transitioning to Harmony ) .

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*UPDATE: one of the animators on the film "Bluehilda" just confirmed to me that the film is all hand drawn in Flash.

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D.T. Nethery wrote: ↑05 Jul 2019, 15:21There seems to be some misconception that the software is responsible for the skillfulness of the animation. The software (TVPaint or Harmony or Toonz or Flash/Adobe Animate) doesn't make the animation fluid or not fluid , it's the skill level of the animator + how much time was the animator allowed to spend on animating the scenes .

What he says.

When I showed this scene http://slowtiger.de/examples/schopeng10.mov some people accused me of using Flash "because it's so smooth!" Its animated on 1's in TVP and nothing else.

neonnoodle wrote: ↑05 Jul 2019, 15:10

Starlight wrote: ↑02 Jul 2019, 12:09 It is a odd idea to give Bunny yellow gloves, how does this go with an orange carrot?

This is a lovely reference to Bugs' 1930s-40s shorts, when he had yellow gloves.

Hmmm... I wonder had you not known of the yellow gloves in those shorts would you think of this as lovely?

He said it was a lovely reference, not a lovely colour choice. He hasn't said if he thinks yellow gloves are lovely or not.