Animation software OpenToonz, which is used by many studios, most notably Japanese Studio Ghibli has been made open source and available for absolutely FREE! And you can also download the same tools that Studio Ghibli used for their process!

“With one announcement, the animation software game may have changed forever. Toonz, the software used by Studio Ghibli to produce films like The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, Howl’s Moving Castle, Ponyo and The Wind Rises, will be made free and open source to the animation community beginning March 26, 2016. The deal, which could have a potentially profound impact on the animation industry, was made possible after Japanese publisher Dwango acquired the Toonz software from Italian tech company Digital Video, which has been producing the animation package since 1993. Ghibli has been using Toonz since the production of Princess Mononoke, and the new OpenToonz is dubbed “Toonz Ghibli Edition” because of all the custom-features that Toonz has developed over the years for the legendary Japanese studio.  Atsushi Okui, executive imaging director at Studio Ghibli, explained that they initially chose Toonz back in 1995 “in order to continue producing theater-quality animation without additional stress,” and a desire for software that had “the ability to combine the hand-drawn animation with the digitally painted ones seamlessly.” 

However, Toonz is not exclusive to Ghibli and is used by plenty of other studios, including Rough Draft, which produced Matt Groening’s Futurama with it, and Folimage, which used it for its recent feature, Phantom Boy.

Simon Hayes provides a peak into using Studio Ghibli’s OpenToonz Plastic software feature to create cutout 2D characters animated using bones and joints. OptenToonz plastic feature is similar to After Effects’ puppet pin tools, however, OptenToonz is a bones or joint based system that surpasses Ae’s rudimentary puppet pins. For one, a bone and joint system will inherently have a hierarchy to them, making them ideal for character rigging and animation. A skeletal system is also the foundation for more advanced systems such as constraints and IK (Inverse Kinematics). Here, Simon Hayes lays out the basics and steps for easily creating a 2D cutout character using the Plastic tool.

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