OpenToonz VS Tahoma 2D | Ultimate Head-to-Head Comparison

2D animation software are invading the market gradually, making it harder to choose which one to adopt in your creation process. To help you out with this, we’ve been making full comparisons of various 2D software. And today we decided to extend the series from the perspective of a new face-off that was requested in the comments: Opentoonz vs Tahoma 2D.

OpenToonz vs Tahoma 2D, is it a matter of price?

These days you don’t have to pay hundreds of dollars for the animation programs you need. Internet and open-source communities have given rise to more than a few outstanding free animation software for both 2D and 3D.

We always review many software in depth, so we can further expand your arsenal of tools even if you’re on budget. But it’s not only a matter of price. In fact, the main goal of these comparisons is to highlight the main strengths, weaknesses and similarities of nowadays’ software regardless if they’re free or paid. You can pick any of our head-to-head comparisons and you’ll definitely see what we mean:

• GIMP vs Adobe Illustrator.
• OpenToonz vs Adobe Animate.
• Krita vs Procreate.

If you’re not convinced yet, we will extend the list from the perspective of a new comparison: OpenToonz vs Tahoma 2D.

1. Software Overview

Let’s start with a brief overview just for the sake of introduction.

OpenToonz is an open-source 2D animation software, and as the name suggests, it’s the free version of the Toonz program that Studio Ghibli uses in their production pipeline. We can safely say that it’s one of the must-have tools, because it’s an excellent piece of software that allows you to create 2D animations based on classic hand-drawn line-art.

It’s also compatible with the TWAIN standards, and although the acronym is known as the Technology Without An Interesting Name, it actually refers to a highly performing API that provides support for scanning, ICC profiles and cameras. This is exactly the reason why OpenToonz is very good for scanning hand-drawn art and applying effects.

Official Website: OpenToonz

Tahoma2D on the other hand is an advanced stop motion and 2D animation software that is also free and open-source. It was developed by Jeremy Bullock with one main objective in mind, which is creating a user-friendly animation program that any artist can access, regardless of the level and the background.

Official Website: Tahoma2D

Looking at some history, Dwango released the source code of Toonz in 2016, which was the primary phase of launching the free version. Funny enough, Tahoma2D itself is also based on OpenToonz and shares most of its features!

2. Use Cases

The 2D animated movies of Studio Ghibli aren’t the only real-life projects that OpenToonz had a hand in making. It was actually used to create many films and games like Futurama, Anastasia, and a part of the sea storm of Asterix in America.

Tahoma2D however is very recent and still finding its own way to the current animation purposes. Nevertheless, it allows you to create traditional, hand-drawn, cut out animation and more.

3. Interface

The interface of OpenToonz is not very intuitive, especially if you’re coming from other software that are industry standard.

The layout is arranged in a slightly different way. For example, you’ll find the timeline is vertically arranged instead of the classic horizontal positioning like most animation software. And that is because OpenToonz uses an X sheet, which is pretty common in the traditional animation to instruct the camera operator. It follows a downward path, but you can change the alignment to whatever you prefer.

On the top right of the UI you’ll see rooms that were created to help you navigate the different areas of the workspace. There’s nine of them that come by default: you have Basics, Cleanup, Drawing, Timeline, Animation, Palette, X sheet, Browser and Farm.

But of course, you get to create and customize new rooms if you needed them.

Tahoma2D also lays the timeline as a column since it uses the X sheet as well. However, it was created for the sole purpose of providing a user-friendly experience. Therefore, the UI is quite intuitive despite the huge similarity with its complicated parent.

There’s a library where you can prepare all the elements that you will use for compositing the scenes. And just like OpenToonz, Tahoma’s interface is divided into rooms that represent different workspaces with various panels. All these elements are fully customizable thanks to the Room Editing Mode.

4. Learning Curve

Now this distinction that lies within the interface will definitely affect the learning curve too:

OpenToonz has a steep learning curve because of how unusual the UI is. But of course, you can rely on the supportive community to help you speed up the process. Not to mention that the keyboard shortcuts will allow you to easily access tools and enhance the workflow.

Tahoma2D is actually quite the opposite: simplicity is one of its greatest advantages. It makes the process of managing the entire project very easy and effective. This is why you’ll notice that the learning curve is quite fine, and the overall journey of mastering the process will be enjoyable.

5. Art Tools

The art tools are similar with a few nuances, and we can emphasize a few of them that stand out:

OpenToonz

• First of all, it has a great set of brushes for both bitmap and vector graphics. You’ll find over 200 of them to simulate many effects, such as watercolor, oil paint, acrylic and much more. However, the brush settings are a bit limited when it comes to size and opacity correlated with pressure sensitivity, having it as minimum and maximum.
• Next you have the GTS scanning tool that was developed by the grand Studio Ghibli itself. This will allow you to optimally import your drawings and turn them into digital art. With 4 different types of scanning and the option of saving the settings to use it again in the future, your drawing skills will be a great advantage.
• Finally, you get to choose 3 types of layers: you have the raster type, Toonz type and the final type that merges both raster and vector technologies. There’s a ton of other features that we can mention, like the anti-aliased lines, the node tree to synthesize effects with a GUI, the tweening coloring and the dynamic palette. But we’re still merely scratching the surface of the huge potential that OpenToonz has.

Tahoma 2D

Moving to Tahoma2D, you’ll clearly notice the similarity:

• First, it supports scanning your hand drawn elements before being defined as an X sheet. It has a cleanup process to refurbish the scanned elements in order to prepare them for the painting process. But if you don’t prefer this method, the software also supports the paperless drawing where you can draw directly in the workspace.
• Second, it allows you to create styles and color referencing especially for the painting animation level during the production. And to achieve that, it uses the color model palette. The biggest advantage of this method is that once you create a palette or a style, you can use it to automatically update all the lines and filled with a single edit.

6. Animation Tools

For animation, OpenToonz is fully packed with an impressive toolset to create frame-by-frame animation similarly to many other vector animation software. It comes with an onionskin feature that you can configure as needed, along with a motion tweening tool. Not to mention that it has some interesting options to make puppet animations.

Tahoma2D on the other hand stands the comparison pretty well. It allows you to make traditional, stop motion and cut out animation among others. It has interpolated keys placed on the necessary parameters dedicated especially for animation purposes, like the camera, table, columns and peg bars.

For transformations, the system uses function curves and numerical columns: with this editing panel, you can control the transformation of objects and special effects by setting key values and related interpolations.

7. Rigging Tools

The rigging tools are also very powerful in both software:

With the awesome skeleton tool, you can create bones for characters and set up a rig. It supports inverse kinematics and you can also use the Hook tool to move the points of your rig.

With Tahoma, you can create links between different sections, like hand and arm for example. After that, you can set pivot points to each section to build the rig.

You’ll also have access to a skeleton tool that has various options to enhance the process. We can mention for example the Build Skeleton to create links, the Animate to animate a character model or the Inverse Kinematics to animate a character using IK.

8. Compositing Tools

Compositing with these two software will definitely blow your mind with the heaps of value that you’ll be getting:

OpenToonz allows you to add stunning visual effects using the FX editor, such as lighting, warping, masks, blurs, rain, dust and particles. Therefore, you can animate special effects and composite scenes effectively.

On the other side of the comparison, Tahoma2D composes all images and painted levels in an X sheet where you can control the timing of scenes and elements.

It also has wonderful special FX like blurs, lights, keys, masks, warps, gradients and much more. You can also use the Render Farm to render scenes on the format and resolution you set up. It allows you to batch-render scenes using multiple computers connected on the same network using TCP/IP.

Opentoonz vs Tahoma 2D: Final Round

As a conclusion, you can see that the huge similarity between these tools will make you struggle to pick just one. But there’s one factor that can really be a tie-breaker in this situation: which is plain flat simplicity.

Tahoma2D is way easier than OpenToonz since it was built to serve the users first and foremost, aiming for the best user experience possible. So as a beginner, we highly recommend Tahoma2D. But if you happen to be a veteran coming from a different animation software for example, exploring OpenToonz first wouldn’t be a problem.

We hope you found this article useful and informative, and for anyone who suggested this topic, we hope you liked our approach on it. Comment below if you think that we’ve missed something or if you have any other suggestions.