WELCOME TO HELIOS. A NEW HOPE FOR 2D ANIMATION

This is a preview of HELIOS, a new animation system created by us, in response to today’s production demands.

Helios is a custom-made Toon Boom Harmony module that allows to rotate a 2D character in real time in any angle on a 360 sphere . It also controls every facial feature of said character:

*  Allows to change the mouth phoneme and keep in in rotation

* Allows dual and individual control of  the brows, and keeps their shape in rotation

* Control over the eyelashes,

* Can handle “Don Bluthian” hair, which is one of the most complex 2D designs there is.

* Controls dual and individual blinks and keeps them in rotation

* You will not loose any Toon  Boom basic functionality. That means you will be 100% able to still do squash, stretch, image substitutions and smears.

 This is the biggest contribution we made  to animation in our careers.

Helios is not something  that you can  just reproduce in Toon Boom, but a very sophisticated plugin with thousands of lines of code.

It has the potential of speeding the animation process 5 to 8 times, according to our calculations, in between other conveniences.

We are pending a test for the Oculus with 2D characters.True  classical toons.

We chose Mrs Brisby for being a classic character, to give us a challenge of maximal difficulty.  What you are seeing here is 95% complete, minus a few patches.We are aware of slight breaks in the character, this is the first ever Helios construction and thus, we are are still testing the limits of the system and figuring the pipeline out.

With Helios in the game, 2D animation can catch up with the speed of the 3D pipeline, at sweet last.

Our dream? To make Heios available to everybody who loves animation, but I must warn it will NOT be Open Source. The tool is almost ready, and soon the distribution Odisey will begin.

If you want to contribute to this project, you can help us make it happen  through Patreon

https://www.patreon.com/duocartoonist

Every pledge from here to February will be invested in this project.