OpenToonz, the application with which Batman Ninja was animated

Last year there was the release of an animated Batman movie "Batman Ninja" which was produced by Warner Bros. Japan and the Japanese technology firm Dwango.

Where the adventure of the superhero samurai traveled back in time and was directed by Junpei Mizusaki (producer, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure) from a script by Kazuki Nakashima (Kill La Kill, Kamen Riders).

Sign that revealed that their open source 2D animation software OpenToonz was one of the tools that helped bring animation to the studio's big screen from Kamikaze Douga, Batman Ninja to the big screen.

About OpenToonz

Toonz is a family of 2D animation software. The base application is being developed by Dwango as open source software under the name OpenToonz.

Which is an extended commercial variant for professionals and professional studios, Toonz Premium, is being developed and marketed by Digital Video SpA.

Digital Video also developed programs like StoryPlanner, a set of tools focused on creating storyboards with graphic and textual information.

line test, a 2D animation software for testing pen and TAB animation, a 2D animation software used to create animations for the Web and Broadcast.

Toonz is used by many studios around the world, including Studio Ghibli and Rough Draft Studios.

First distributed by Dwango in March 2016, OpenToonz is based on the Toonz tool from Italian developer Digital Video SpA and is now accessible for anyone to use and modify for free.

The OpenToonz features include functions customized by the user of Toonz Studio Ghibli.

Dwango has developed visual effects that use its artificial intelligence technology and plug-in features that allow any user to add effects.

Since its launch, Dwango has been making additional modifications based on feedback on the site, as during the production of the first feature film made in OpenToonz: Mary and the Witch's Flower (Studio Ponoc).

How to install OpenToonz on Ubuntu and derivatives?

For those who are interested in being able to install this tool on their systems, they can do so in the following way.

The easiest way to obtain this application without compiling its source code is installing from Snap packages.

Where we are only going to open a terminal and in it type:

sudo snap install opentoonz

Another way we have is with the help of Flatpak packages, we only have to have the support of this in our system to install applications of this type.

In a terminal we will have to type:

flatpak install flathub io.github.OpenToonz

Compiling the source code

Now for those blessed who want to compile, before installing this application, it is necessary that we carry out the installation of the application's dependencies, so that it can be executed without problems.

So that let's open a terminal via the key combination Ctrl + Alt + T or searching for 'terminal' from the application menu and in it we will execute the following:

sudo apt-get install build-essential git cmake pkg-config libboost-all-dev qt5-default qtbase5-dev libqt5svg5-dev qtscript5-dev qttools5-dev qttools5-dev-tools libqt5opengl5-dev qtmultimedia5-dev libsuperlu-dev liblz4-dev libusb-1.0-0-dev liblzo2-dev libpng-dev libjpeg-dev libglew-dev freeglut3-dev libsdl2-dev libfreetype6-dev libjson-c-dev

For those who are users of the latest Ubuntu versions such as 18.04 LTS or 18.10, you can install libmypaint from repository and don't need to compile it from source:

 sudo apt-get install libmypaint-dev

Once all this is done, we are going to download the source code of the application with:

git clone https://github.com/opentoonz/opentoonz

And after that we execute in the terminal:

mkdir -p $HOME/.config/OpenToonz

cp -r opentoonz/stuff $HOME/.config/OpenToonz/

cat << EOF > $HOME/.config/OpenToonz/SystemVar.ini

[General]

OPENTOONZROOT="$HOME/.config/OpenToonz/stuff"

OpenToonzPROFILES="$HOME/.config/OpenToonz/stuff/profiles"

TOONZCACHEROOT="$HOME/.config/OpenToonz/stuff/cache"

TOONZCONFIG="$HOME/.config/OpenToonz/stuff/config"

TOONZFXPRESETS="$HOME/.config/OpenToonz/stuff/projects/fxs"

TOONZLIBRARY="$HOME/.config/OpenToonz/stuff/projects/library"

TOONZPROFILES="$HOME/.config/OpenToonz/stuff/profiles"

TOONZPROJECTS="$HOME/.config/OpenToonz/stuff/projects"

TOONZROOT="$HOME/.config/OpenToonz/stuff"

TOONZSTUDIOPALETTE="$HOME/.config/OpenToonz/stuff/studiopalette"

EOF

cd opentoonz/thirdparty/tiff-4.0.3

./configure --with-pic --disable-jbig

make -j$(nproc)

cd ../../

Finally, to compile, we are going to type the following:

cd toonz

mkdir build

cd build

cmake ../sources

make -j$(nproc)

LANG=C make VERBOSE=1

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=./lib/opentoonz:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH ./bin/OpenToonz

sudo make install