Category Archives: Technology

Today Toon Boom announced our new release, Storyboard Pro 5! Storyboard Pro is recognized as an industry standard in storyboarding, and the studios and artists who use it to create stories are passionate about what they can do with its toolset.

Storyboard Pro 5 is available for free as a benefit for customers who own a Desktop Subscription or Perpetual license with Support. Simply go to the Toon Boom site and download your new software today.

You can buy Storyboard Pro 5 for as low as $38 per month on a yearly subscription or $999 for a perpetual licence. A full breakdown of pricing can be found here.

If you haven’t tried Storyboard Pro yet, download our free trial of Storyboard Pro 5 here. There are loads of free learning materials available to help get you started.

What’s New

The new release of Storyboard Pro streamlines the workflow with new creative tools for artists, adds improvements to the 3D workflow, and provides better integration with editorial.

With a new more neutral UI colour scheme that reduces eye strain, Storyboard Pro 5 makes it easier for artists to accurately see the colours they are working with. Of course, for artists who prefer the original look, the traditional colour scheme is still available.

A better 3D Workflow

The 3D toolset in Storyboard Pro lets you integrate 3D models, block out camera shots and create scenes with depth. Storyboard Pro 5 includes several new features that provide better integration between 2D and 3D.

There’s the new Snap to Surface that makes it easier to position and animate 3D models on a 2D plane like a floor or wall (this feature works with 2D artwork as well). You can create layers on surfaces when you want to draw on 3D models, which is a powerful way to add 2D artwork to your 3D scenes. The 3D camera is much more responsive making it easier to position, do tilts, pans, rotations and camera rolls. And Alembic and Collada can now be imported (added to existing support for FBX and 3DS), making it easier to bring in CG content.

Here you see a 2D prop being positioned inside a 3D spaceship. Positioning and animation controls let you easily place your artwork, which will maintain contact with the surface no matter what changes you make.

Enhanced Bitmap Drawing Tools

Storyboard Pro has both vector and bitmap drawing tools that interact seamlessly. This provides the flexibility that artists are looking for when developing artwork from sketch to cleanup. New in Storyboard Pro 5 are customizable tips for bitmap brushes. These enable more artistic freedom and control over the look and feel.

Change the roundness, hardness, and angle of tips as well as add randomness to affect the resulting lines. Brush tips can be customized, and you can create your own in Photoshop, Harmony or Storyboard Pro.

Better Organization with Layer Groups

In Storyboard Pro, artists can break out their artwork into an unlimited number of layers in a single storyboard panel – for example, character line work and shading can be drawn on separate layers. This enables artistic freedom and makes it easier to edit drawings. For an even more fluid creative development process and exchange between artists, Storyboard Pro 5 features the ability group layers of drawings – making it easier to organize and share content.

When you select a group of layers, all the layers move together. With Layer groups, artists spend more time being creative and less time searching for artwork, which is especially important when projects need to be turned around quickly.

Faster Revisions with Shared Drawings

Some drawings, like a background, are regularly reused in a storyboard. To make it easier to update this kind of artwork, you can now share drawings – use a single drawing across multiple panels. When you make a change, the artwork updates everywhere so you can move on more quickly to the next creative process.

Qt Application Scripting

New Qt Application scripting support can help you save time by creating scripts that automate manual tasks, or you can create new tools that can be accessed at the click of a button.

To get you started, a number of example scripts are available in this release – delete hidden layers, export the camera path, change the timing of multiple panels simultaneously, and others.

Better Integration between Storyboard Pro and Editing

Added support for 23.976 NDF timecode enables the seamless transfer of animatics from Storyboard Pro to the editing suite making it even easier to collaborate with editors. Storyboard artists can now work with this frame rate, directly exporting animatics and timelines with panels, sound, transitions, and timing to editing suites via EDL, AAF, and XML.

For those who haven’t tried Storyboard Pro yet, now is a great time. The new features in Storyboard Pro 5 add to an already great blend of creative tools and technical capabilities that help customers increase pipeline efficiency and creative output. Try it out!