Toon Boom snow...

Does ToonBoom allow any scripting like Flash does? If so, I made a rain effect that I could port over for you into snow.

Hi i need to do a paralaxing snow scene in Toon Boom, ive tried it in scene planning mode but i cant get it to loop so that snow keeps falling, it plays the whole movie first then when all the snow has gone it plays it again, i need a continuous flow, any help would be great! thanks

Joe Sparks has some notes on parallax at his site www.joesparks.com, though he's talking about Flash. The scene does have snow in it, but I don't think falling, so it may not be what you want.

As for snow itself, we're talking about a kind of tediious process. Tony White talks about creating rain and snow in his book (the title of which escapes me at the moment--Animator's Handbook?). I gave this a shot last fall (also in TBS) and was getting the hang of things, but then my son was born and all bets were off. Anyway...

What you do is draw a chart that shows the path of a bunch of snow flakes, then mark the positions of the flakes along the way with a mind toward timing. Then you use copys of the same flake in a few layers to get it to fall on a frame by frame basis, then loop though those frames. It leans toward traditional animation, which means time consuming and tedious, but the results will be better.

Other possibilities:

Moho has a built in snow generator, but it wont' work too good as an .swf. Moho is inexpensive and useful for other things.

Anim8or (free) has a related program called Terranim8or (also free) that generates snowfall also. Once you pull it through Anim8or, you can vectorize the output for flash/TBS or you can output the frames in QT or some other program to get an image series in bitmap. Use a .gif so you can utilize the transparency. If you're bound for video instead of .swf, you can overlay your snowfall in different layers in Premiere or AE.

To effectively using looping for something like a snowflake in TBS, you have to attach duplicates of it to the peg you are looping. I did this in a riding sequence (yeah, Harleys) with the same set of cacti going by in the bg, parallax style. It worked only after I realized that "loop" in TBS doesn't mean loop the object, it just keeps looping the darn peg. So you have to duplicate the object and attach the duplicate to the peg. Considering how much snow we're talking about, you could be in for a bit of work that way.

Hope that helps.

Edit: Then I scroll down and see my ol' pal Scattered has a probably better solution. You can't do scripting in Toon Boom, but you could use the .swf output from a flash movie, even if you had to modify the flash movie or script to get it to work. There may just be an easier, softer way.

I can relate. I think, however, that ScatterdLogical said he'd send it to you. Did I make that up or have a lapse of literacy (it truly happens)...

"I'll port it over to you" he sez.

Does ToonBoom allow any scripting like Flash does? If so, I made a rain effect that I could port over for you into snow.

Hi ScatteredLogical,

Can I see your code or FLA for your rain? I'm trying to do snow in Flash MX and I have a Kirupa snow example, but its not quite right.

Thanks

Yeah - I'll just add that if you use any scriping in Flash it gets very hard to export movie files- though you can always use a screen reader.