Camera Effects

Even though you don't use multiple cameras in Toon Boom Studio, there are a lot of ways to create camera effects to give momentum to your animation.

Even though you don’t use multiple cameras in Toon Boom Studio, there are a lot of ways to create camera effects to give momentum to your animation. For camera effects, we suggest moving around the camera, either with smooth panning or with quick cuts from one place to another on the scene. To do these effects, we can rely on two tools: the Peg element and the Function Editor.
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Camera Trucks and Dolly

The first thing you should always do when you want to add camera effects is attach your camera to a peg. Drag the camera element onto the peg. Then use the Motion tool to move your camera around the scene in the same way as you would move any element attached to a peg. Then create the path you want the camera to follow and it will move around from the beginning of the path to the end. You can fine tune your motion by adding one or more motion points.

*Note: you can attach any camera to a peg, but to see the result of the movement you must select the camera in the Camera List in the Scene View toolbar. Also, remember that whenever you render a scene, it will use the camera selected in the Camera List.

Holding Position

You may want to stop the camera from moving for a certain amount of time, then resume moving again. You can easily do this by creating a keyframe at the position at which you want the camera to stay in place, then copy the newly created keyframe to a later frame in your scene.

Creating Cuts

Cutting means moving a camera from one position to another without any transition. To do clean cuts, you will first need to keyframe every position you want to go to on the peg. Then, on the timeline, select the keyframe you want the scene to be cut from and set the segment to constant (Element > Peg > Set Constant Segment; or [Ctrl] + [L] for Windows users and [Command] + [L] for Mac OS X users). By doing this, you will remove any interpolation in between the current frame and the next frame (meaning the camera will not move in between the two positions, creating a clean cut). To change a segment back to its original state, you will need to reset the peg to a non-constant segment (Element > Peg > Set Non Constant Segment or [Ctrl] + [Shift] + [L]). This will reactivate the interpolation in between the two keyframes.

Ease in/out

An ease-in is an acceleration of a movement over time. Conversely, an ease-out is the deceleration of a movement toward a specific frame. You can control the speed of the acceleration and deceleration of a movement through the Function Editor (display this window by selecting Window > Show Function Editor). You can see any transformations over time that you applied to an element represented as a graph in that window.

Once you have opened up the editor you will need to display the Velocity Function. By default, the velocity is represented as a straight line between both points on the graph. To create an ease-in and ease-out you will need to reshape the line so it becomes curved. Click a point to display handles that you can use to reshape the curve the way you want. You can add additional points to your curve to change the dynamism of movement by selecting a frame (the vertical line marks the frame number) and clicking the arrow with a + icon. You can remove any keyframe in the editor by selecting the frame where it is located and clicking the arrow with a – icon. When you change the velocity of the peg’s movement you might notice that the position of the element over time will vary on the peg based on the new velocity.