The power of Toon Boom!

Having fun with the pencil tool in Toon Boom Animate PRO 3. Toon Boom have really improved this tool quite a bit.

They’ve added the ability to have variable widths within a pencil stroke. You can adjust the width manually or select an existing preset, or even create your own presets.

In the past, to get thick and thin lines you’d have to use the brush tool and obviously a graphics tablet with pressure sensitivity to get the desired effect. If you needed to adjust thickness on the brush stroke afterwards, you would have to deal with the inner vector lines and outer vector lines and it can take some time.

New to to Animate PRO 3, the ‘Pencil Editor’ makes it easy to adjust the thickness of a pencil stroke. The advantage of this is, you only have to work with a single vector line, which means less vectors for your CPU to process. Another neat thing they’ve added to the pencil tool is the ability to draw with textures. I believe in Animate PRO 2, this was only possible with the brush tool.

The image above demonstrates what you can do with the pencil tool. On the left is a regular pencil stroke with variable width and on the right is the same thing but with a charcoal texture applied to it. Pretty cool!