This is a bit of a complicated situation to condense into a single headline. Digital Video is a research and software development studio out of Rome, who specializes in computer graphics (as their name suggests). One of their applications, Toonz, is the animation tool that Studio Ghibli used to create their video content. If you haven't heard of them, they created Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, Ponyo, and the cutscenes for the Ni no Kuni video game franchise, among others. In fact, Princess Mononoke was the original use case for "Toonz Ghibli Edition" back in the mid 90s.
Today's news is that Digital Video will be open sourcing Toonz, including some or all of the enhancements made by Studio Ghibli, into a product called “OpenToonz”. This is because a Japanese media publisher, Dwango, purchased the rights to the software and wanted it to be a community project. Rather than selling the product directly, Digital Video will transition into installation, training, and support. They will also have their own version, called Toonz Premium, which they claim will be for companies to request specific customizations. It will be available for both OSX and Windows.
While a lot of studios are turning to 3D applications, like Maya and Blender, for their 2D art, and Blender is 100% open source, more is better. The software will be “presented” at Anime Japan (March 26 and 27) but they don't clarify whether that means released, demoed, on the show floor, or unveiled. Could be worth checking out for any animators in our audience.
Scott, when are they going to
Scott, when are they going to have their free version on their website, all they appear to have at the moment is the press release and the premium version information.
I have been doing some scanning/auto-tracing in inkscape of images into vector graphics and then importing them into Blender, but Inkscape has a problem of putting too many svg nodes too close together and getting tiny loops/imperfections in the svg segments when it auto-traces the paths. This causes Blender to improperly fill the svg’s closed curves. So when I use Inkscape’s trace path I’ll get 256(max) separate paths and some will not properly be imported in Blender, and fixing them is near impossible, as finding the offending node/s can be damn hard, if it can be done at all. Does this Toons software have an equivalent functionality to inkscape’s trace path, and is there a way to assure that there are no loops/other small imperfections in the line segments between the nodes in Toons that can cause Blender to have problems.
Inkscape has a method to reduce the number of nodes but it impacts the paths geometry to a degree, so maybe this Toons software has some better functionality to produce svg paths that Blender will be able to import without as many errors. Please try and get a beta version of their free package if you can and see what functionality the free version will support, but it’s great that the software is going to have a free version. If they are actually going to open source the code under what open source licensing will they be using, and hopefully the code will be useable in Blender/other software as plug-ins, but it looks like this open Toons package will be available by the end on March of 2016(?).
Somewhere on Blender’s website they had a news story about some Toons like functionality via Blender’s grease pencil and some plug-in that was not yet available, but the story has been moved into the article archives and is not listed in chronological order, so I can not find it! there was a video demonstrating some Toons like functionality for Blender.