ToonLifeOnline Blog

Pencil was one of the programs I noticed in the Animation Software page that Wes created for ToonTube which particularly grabbed my attention.  Having recently experimented with it a little, I thought I’d write a brief review for those of you who might want another digital animating tool.

For starters, Pencil free and open source.  It has versions for Max OS X, Windows, and Linux.  I tried out the Windows version.  Installation was very simple – I just unzipped it into the folder where I wanted it, and it was all set to go.

The program itself is pretty straightforward too.  Twelve different drawing/manipulation tools are available to create your frames (also known as “keys”).  After drawing the first page of your animation, subsequent pages display a grayed out copy (onion skin) of the preceding page, so you can conveniently re-draw it and make changes consistant with how you want to animate it.  (Or you can turn the onion skin off if you don’t want to see it).

There are also tools to create multiple layers (bitmap or vector) and a preview tool to see how your animation-in-progress looks when moving.  You can select different colors for the “coloring tool” and “draw” tools, but the “sketch” tool (as far as I can see) is always black.  There are some other goodies as well, but I’ll leave those for you to discover.

Once you get your animation the way you want it, you can save it in .mov  format.  You can also export it to a variety of other formats.  I did have some difficulty exporting it to images in jpeg format when they all ended up as a zero bytes size that would not import into anything else.  Then the program seemed determined to stick with my initial choice of jpeg, and the only way I could see to switch to png (the other choice for image exports) was to re-install the program.  Not that re-installing was a big deal – It didn’t take more than a minute or two.  So it was not insurmountable.

In addition to providing you with the initial download which you will (of course) need to get started, the website (http://www.pencil-animation.org/) has some additional information and sample output, as well as reasonably active forum of Pencil users.

Overall,  I think Pencil is a pretty neat program.  It doesn’t have all the bells, whistles, and polish that you might find in some more complex (and often expensive) programs, but it is easy to learn the basics and get to the fun stuff quickly.  The tools it does have, give you some pretty neat capabilities, particularly if you have some drawing skill.  I definitely hope to use it in some of my future animations.

Ted