The Difference Between Cut-out and Bone Animation – Character Rigging


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A question was recently asked by one of our Toon Boom Studio users, “What is the difference between Cut-out and Bone animation?”  This short series explains those differences.
The most prominent differences between these two styles of animation are:

  • The way a character is rigged
  • The flow of movement in the animation
  • The length of time it takes to animate

This video deals with the way a character is rigged.

Character Rigging
In Cut-out animation a character is rigged by cutting and separating the character into layers for each body part.
If you watch the video below you will learn how to rig an arm using separate layers.

In Bone animation, the bones can be drawn directly on the character. There is no need to cut up the character into separate parts.

So we hope that this explains at least some of the differences between Cut-out and Bone animation.

For further detail on how to animate using bones, read the Toon Boom Studio – Bones animation tutorial

Coming soon… Flow of Movement

Find out more useful techniques and info with our Toon Boom Studio Animation Resources 

5 thoughts on “The Difference Between Cut-out and Bone Animation – Character Rigging

  1. Why does the riggin video give me 4 chorices to watch NONe of which are the video offered and I cannot do anything about it.
    I’m not quite ready to give Toon Boom the sloppy work award, but the overall score is adding up.

    • Hell Jim,
      The 4 video thumbnails which appear after the rigging video are automatically chosen by YouTube based on topic, neither we nor anyone else has control over what these thumbnails are. When you first open the blog the video displayed is the rigging video, after it plays the thumbnails of these other video are displayed. You could refresh the browser to display the rigging video again or if you click on the replay video icon (bottom left corner of the YouTube window) this will run it again.

  2. Pingback: The Difference Between Cut-out and Bone Animation – Flow of Movement « News On Toon Boom Animation

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