By Andrew Joscelyne
At the Monte Carlo Imagina show held last February, a four-year-old Paris-based company called 2001 unveiled TicTacToon, a software package that aims to become the PageMaker of cartoon production.
TicTacToon is designed to be an all-in-one solution for cartoon production, so that storyboarding, drawing, animating, and coloring can take place entirely within the computer.
To accomplish this, TicTacToon uses vector (rather than bit-map) graphics, allowing artists to create, flip, roll, scale up and down, copy, and paste drawings in real time, with no loss of resolution. This also means that the resulting animations can be transferred to any medium – video, HDTV, 35 mm, or 70 mm – without loss of quality. And since vector images require less storage space than bit-mapped images, a TicTacToon database of storyboards, drawings, and animated sequences can be easily distributed over a network to different physical sites.
Once an animated sequence for a character has been created, an artist can immediately view the results in a test window in the corner of the computer screen – a far cry from the half day's preparation needed for traditional video line tests.
Fundamental research in topology also helped the 2001 team come up with an elegant solution to another classic cartoon time-eater: coloring. Once a character has been created on the tablet, the program will calculate the topological structure of the lines, determine the different shapes, and fill in the colors automatically.
For about US$33,000 customers get DE's Alpha Workstation, a digitizing pad, and the TicTacToon software. With an increasingly larger portion of the animation pie getting gobbled up by assembly-line studios in the Far East, TicTacToon may just be the cost-effective tool that lets small animation houses hold on to their share. 2001: + 33 (1) 46 66 54 54, fax +33 (1) 46 66 59 50, email hhx@two-oo-one.fr.
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