TabCo Tab Student 3.0

A fabulous alternative to hand drawing

The TAB has been created to satisfy the needs of cartoon artists, animation designers and web-animation developers who need a quick and powerful tool for their creations, eliminating the tedious slowness of the hand-drawn animation. Animators with traditional animation background, accustomed to high-end animation programs, will find in the TAB a new exciting alternative tool to draw, paint and animate their cartoon characters.

Product Features
Calligraphic Touch
Constant-thickness lines are not the ideal solution for expressive drawings, especially if an artist want to give a peculiar feature to his characters. In the TAB you can draw directly expressive variable-thickness lines according to the pressure of the pen on the tablet thanks to the support of pressure-sensitive tablets.

Do Things with Style
Vector-based images usually imply the use of flat colors and do not offer the wide range of possibilities an artist needs when drawing or animating. In the TAB different styles can be defined and applied to strokes and areas. Styles range from plain colors supporting transparency, to special styles with multiple colors effects, from textures to sequence of drawings used as "scattered brushes" to create your own styles.

Intuitive Tools for Powerful Results
Handling vectors usually means handling control points by using direction points at the end of direction lines. Do you think this is too complex? They do. The strokes you draw are very simple to manipulate. Lines have no control points, so any tool can be applied wherever you want along the line. An option is available to set the intensity of the modifier tool, in this way the same tool can gently correct the bend of a line or can be used to pull out a complex shape from a simple outline. The editing can be also performed when the drawing has been already colored, because the filled area always follow the shape of the outline. This allows you to "model" finished drawings in order to create an animation.

Animate Drawings Like You Were Modelling Clay
The TAB is not made just for drawing, but for ANIMATING. You can start from a single drawing, and bring it to life by making subsequent modifications. And to check the animation you can use the onion-skin feature, that allows you to view what you draw superimposed on any other sequence of drawings as reference.

Inbetween Drawings
How it is boring to create drawings to make your animation smoother once a starting and ending drawing is made. With the TAB you have just to click one button, and the inbetween process is automatically performed. All you have to do is to model the ending drawing starting from the first one, insert blank frames in the sequence, select a frame range and interpolate the first and last drawing of your selection by clicking the Inbetweener button. If you want the interpolation to last more or less frames, you can insert or cut frames, and use the inbetweener again.

Cutout Characters
If you want to animate your character like a puppet, without drawing each position but moving the sections it is made of, use the TAB features to create cutout animation. Draw the character in sections, create hierarchical links by dragging the chain icons in the column header from the "son" to the "father" drawing (like hand-to-arms, arms-to-body, etc.) and make a skeleton-like structure. Now set key positions at different frames and the TAB will do the rest.

The First Color Fast Software
Managing colors when you have to deal with a high number of drawings is an issue. The TAB images are color-mapped, and as soon as a color is changed, all the areas linked to that color will change, with no need to repaint them. This means you can calibrate colors and shades in a completed scene as well, with the possibility to see immediately how the changes are affecting the scene, or create different animations starting from the same scene simply modifying styles in the palette. And when you stretch, pull or distort a drawing because you want to animate it, filled areas will remain stuck to the strokes you're stretching like gum! Say stop to boring coloring sessions and vanishing colors: with the TAB, colors won't fade!

Stage Movement
If you want to be a real director you need a camera in your hand that allows you to perform all the movements a camera can do when shooting a sequence. When you create a scene, you can think of your drawings like characters on a stage. This includes the possibility to actually move the camera through characters and elements placed on the stage, as if it moves with a dolly or a truck.
When activated the viewer displays the cone of the camera and all the scene contents with the projections on an imaginary floor and wall that let you understand the position of the drawings in relation to each other and in relation to the camera. You can move the working area displayed by the viewer, and you can rotate the view to set the best way to edit objects position. When the scene contains objects placed at different distances from the camera, animating the camera automatically will generate a multiplane effect, with closer drawings displacing faster in case of a camera pan, or scaled bigger in case of a camera truck.

Lip Synching
When you need to synchronize the movement of a character's lips with the sound of his speech, you can scrub the audio tracks loaded in the scene in order to examine them. Once you have created different mouth images, by analyzing the soundtrack you can find where to place specific mouth drawings. Soundtrack breakdown can be done both by looking at the sound wave in the scene column, for example to spot where each word starts, and by listening to specific sections.
When mouth images are placed in the proper place, you can check the sync by selecting again the soundtrack section you're interested in: while listening to the selected audio section, the related frames will be displayed in the viewer. This technique can be used in any case you need to combine audio and animation in such a way that the sound is perfectly synchronized with the action, for example a character playing an instrument, or a scene based on the rhythm of a music.

Alpha In and Out
In the TAB you can import clips and full-color images, or sequences of full-color images; images or clips with alpha channel information once imported will retain their transparency information. Animation can also be exported including the alpha channel information. This may be useful when clips or animation made with the TAB have to be imported in other software for some compositing or editing.
To set the transparency of the background, assign a transparency to the Background style by using the alpha slider in the Style Editor. Once the background is fully (or partially) transparent, the opacity and transparency of the used styles and of the imported full-color images will be taken into account to create the alpha channel of the final output.

System Requirements