Well it's almost 2025. I'm going to make it a new habit to enforce the 50/50 rule where one half is somewhat aimless drawing for the sake of it and the other half is dedicated practice. With how I'm doing things right now, it's sucked all the fun out of it regardless if it's practice or to entertain myself.

One show that I think left a big impression on what I like to see more of would be courage the cowardly dog. I think the best example would be the episode with the snuff film directors who want to murder Muriel and Eustace for their latest film.

It's a snuff film. You can't get around it, they wanted to make profit off their murder victims being filmed. That's why I'm in a way, convinced the animators wanted to more than a mere kids show but didn't have much of a choice because adult swim hadn't come out yet. Today, courage would fit in perfectly branded as an adult oriented show as a love letter to B films and grotesque horror films of old. Along with other things I grew up on, I would say it's impression left me wanting to see more horror or at least elements of horror in animation. Back then and still today, you really can't say killed or died in something marketed as a kids show, but the choice of wording makes it sound more terrifying than had they just said killed. That's why I would say courage is possibly my favorite thing cartoon network came out with, because of the risks it was willing to take.

Now, I don't subscribe to the notion that shoving in a lewd joke past the censors auto changes it from being a genuine kids show to something made for adults. Because the very premise of courage was a horror film or at its tamest a thriller of sorts.

I'm starting to when practicing or just drawing for my own fun or whatever, that pen & ink is the most enjoyable out of any tool as of right now. Why? Firstly it's the cheapness of the tool because it could be a mere ballpoint pen or a dedicated fine liner or whatever you have lying around. Secondly, it is essentially permanent so it alleviates any pressure of perfection. And thirdly, it's just very cool to see how it turns out. You can if you know what you're doing range from very detailed drawings to very surrealistic sketches. Like this taken from a book called "how to draw in pen and ink"

To me, this is beautiful because of the limitations of the tool used to its advantage. I'm certainly not against pencil, pencil is perfect for certain types of tasks or desired outcomes, but pen and ink is cool in a way that graphite can't replicate the same thing in the same way.

You may know about my other stuff about OpenToonz plugins. I came to the decision to recreate it as a new project called the toonz expansion pack. Previously I put far too much emphasis on the low level COM like API stuff. On the contrary, you can do much with the higher level stuff such as GLSL shaders. You can find far more detail (Complete with images) in my new thread.

To OpenToonz and Tahoma2D, there are two different types of Fx's. A regular and zerary where zerary is not to have any input ports and regular does. This wasn't documented at all, but a single macro flag TOONZ_PLUGIN_CLASS_MODIFIER_GEOMETRIC is (what it appears so far) to be implementing a zerary effect that has its own level and camera. There's bound to be a ton of stuff left to discover that isn't documented at all.

My Tahoma2D project that's a powerhouse bundling of stuff to make Tahoma2D as awesome as it can be is under the GPLv3 now. Just my stuff, the original sources are untouched. Reason being is that in the scenario I static link against ffmpeg and/or enable the gpl stuff in ffmpeg, I have to make it GPL. And I'm just preparing in the scenario it gets bigger as it goes along, so I decided to GPL it.

If you don't like the GPL, the only thing that might catch you is the header file wrapper (The wolf and dwango plugins use a wrapper also) that if you pull it in, you have to GPL your plugins that links against OpenCV. I suggest making your own wrapper if you don't want that.

I mentioned last news update I might do a custom build of Tahoma2D, that's only if I decide on linking against ffmpeg that requires GPL licensing or some other reason. I'll cross that bridge when I have to cross it.

This is going to be a short status report on whats to come in the future. I started this a few days ago wanting to make a plugin or two for Tahoma2D. Over the few days I've discovered how little documentation there truly is how more under the hood Tahoma2D/OpenToonz truly is. Another issue that arose was compiling the plugins from the github repo against my debian version of OpenCV. This resulted in segmentation faults killing the program. So I have no choice but to distribute my own build of Tahoma2D.

What I'm doing is making and collecting plugins, macros, brushes, user themes, shaders, particle effects, and anything else I can think up and distribute my own build of Tahoma2D via GitHub actions. It's all rather simple and I'll keep making tiny status updates as I go along.

In the past two days I've learned a lot about how you can extend OpenToonz/Tahoma2D. I started off thinking it's primarily in C++ with OpenCV, but you can also extend it with themes in CSS, GLSL shaders, particle effects, user macros to set presets for convenience, MyPaint brushes, and other stuff I might not have even discovered yet. I'll keep making news posts to this as I toy with it.

I made this because I wanted to help contribute to opentoonz as well as add additional documentation I found to be lacking. It's been one hell of a ride, but I think it's paying off so far. I at first posted it in my file dump, but it's gotten big enough to justify a github repository. OpenToonz/Tahoma2D is incredibly powerful, it just needs more contributions and documentations for others to be inspired to make their own.

Right now I'm just toying with the OpenToonz/Tahoma2D plugin system which utilizes it's own internal API as well as OpenCV for plugin effects. Nothing big or world changing, just wanted to toy with things. If I make anything interesting, I'll make an update. I put it here.

I've wasted too much time on bullshit, from here on out, animation is my #1 concern outside of personal health.