Toon Boom, the Montreal-headquartered provider of 2D cel animation software, has made large gains in the Indian market, thanks in part to its association with distributor Rahul Commerce. Among its new clients in South Asia are Dataquest Management and Communication and Sriven Multitech, both based out of the tech-savvy Indian city of Hyderabad.

Dataquest, a 2D and 3D digital animation house, chose Toon Boom’s flagship usanimation software package, largely due to its readiness to support the Flash format. Dataquest used the newly acquired software to create a demo video in two weeks of production time, for a presentation at the SIGGRAPH 2000 conference in New Orleans.

Sriven has become the largest installation of usanimation in the country with the announcement that Webtoons India, its 75-staff creative animation and digital ink-and-paint facility, has made the product its software of choice. Sriven is involved in traditional cel animation for film and tv as well as animation for new media, with the belief the software will facilitate multi-platform production in one streamlined process.

‘Its ability to make Flash files from traditionally executed animation means that the content is ready for delivery to the Web immediately,’ said Dr. Neeraj Raj, executive director and creative head of Sriven, in a statement.

In other news, Toon Boom will be shipping usanimation version 5 sp 2 in mid-November. The update features the support of different styles of line animation, such as crayon and chalk, the horizontal flipping of images, and various other bug fixes and improvements. In the following month, the company will be releasing Toonshader, which allows the conversion of Maya models and scenes to usanimation’s Paint format. The first release of Toonshader will run on the nt platform, and will subsequently be available for irix and Linux. *

-www.toonboom.com