I get the impression from my friends in the animation industry that Toon Boom’s animation suite pretty much dominates the industry. Flash hung on a while but TB has so many features designed for the particular craft of assembling a small army of people who collaborate on making a moving and talking drawing.
I keep on thinking of ditching ~25y of specializing in Illustrator for TB lately but I really just do not feel like paying $1k/y for a subscription to it. They have cheaper subscriptions but one of the ways they differentiate them is by limiting the effects, and “constantly pushing the limits of Illustrator’s effect system” is one of the reasons I want to move on from it.
Toon Boom’s domination really is very regional. But that’s one reason I list flash as having competitors.
In Canada, you’ll find a lot of the larger shops use toon boom and the smaller shops use Flash/Animate.
When you move out to Asia, the balance changes quite a bit the other way but you also see a lot more players in the form of OpenToonz etc entering. Especially on the anime front.
god it's like there's actual multiple viable options, is that even legal any more. My animation friends are all in the LA scene; they all started out in Flash cartoons in the 00s and some of 'em kept on using it for a pretty long time but it seems to have pretty much vanished.
I really gotta make some time to grind on tutorials for Toon Boom or this copy of Moho 14 I have on my computer and see if I actually want to animate again once I get over the hump of "how does this giant toolkit even work".
I keep on thinking of ditching ~25y of specializing in Illustrator for TB lately but I really just do not feel like paying $1k/y for a subscription to it. They have cheaper subscriptions but one of the ways they differentiate them is by limiting the effects, and “constantly pushing the limits of Illustrator’s effect system” is one of the reasons I want to move on from it.