Here is a sample of more than 50 tools I helped studios to create to enhance their 2D Animation workflow. The focus of those tools where always to increase quality, speed or reduce cost of workflows to allow the creative team to achieve the upmost production values.
Embedded Files
Library Tools
Library Tools
The Action Library is perfect to store, organize, and have all animations and poses right at hand. The action library can get pretty big, so ordering, tagging and searching features become a must. The Mini Library is like the Action library's young sister, mostly used for fast reuses like lipsync, turn arounds, head angles and such.
Light Tools
Light Tools
The light tools are custom made for the 2D Lighting department.
Light Menu helps with rigging and access to all lighting tools.
Light Navigator simplifies the navigation of lighting nodes while animating.
Light Palette make it easy to repaint lighting passes on a asset or on a whole scene.
Light Library allows storage of lighting rigs as well as easily importing, removing, unlink and relink. Lighting rigs come with color of assets, passes, auto linking nodes data and everything that is needed to speed up the lighting process.
Swap Tools
Swap Tools
BG Swap is capable of reducing the quality of BG layers to speed up renders on the farm to up to 60x. Its also capable of updating BG versions easily without the need to change the BG rig, making it possible for continuos version updates while other departments work.
Color Swap allows palette colors to be updated at will, allowing sequence palettes to be stored per character, or special palettes for masking to be stored by comp etc...
Animation Swap allows loading any published scene version to copy animation from any character or frame range, virtually turning the whole show into a huge library.
Line Tools
Line Tools
Line Thickness gives boldness control to each drawing on a asset, on asset groups, selections or to the whole asset at once, allowing advanced perpective control as well as control over time.
Line Boil allows a combination of drawing boil, deformers boil and texture boil for the ultimate tracing simulation in Harmony, making rigs look more like traditional animation.
Render Tools
Render Tools
Quick Render allows comp artists to render a part of the scene to see the final result while they work on another part. Once your render sequence is done you can review it locally or send the link of it for someone else to take a pick.
Layer Baker can render high fidelity EXR frame sequences capable of replacing vector assets, like a crowd of characters, for a single bitmap layer, while keeping the link between them for future render updates. It also allows for those baked frames to be retimed, while keeping them updatable still.
Render Layers simplify the circuit from going to Harmony to external applications like After Effects and Nuke, allowing for easy preview, ordering and naming of layers without cluttering the node view with write nodes and unuseful connections.
Disclaimer
The exposition of these tools was approved by the studios they were made for.
The opinions expressed on this page do not represent those from my contractors or their partners.
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