Rumba: new animation software in development

In an article on Cartoon Brew, it was revealed that Mercenaries Engineering (the developers of Guerilla Render) in partnership with TeamTO are developing new software applications to help create and animate the characters for the upcoming animated series Mighty Mike & The Wild Bunch. Overmind is a production management tool and more excitingly Rumba is a new animation tool. 

In actual fact, it would appear that Rumba has been in development for a while under the name of Collodi. You can read a brief article about it (in French) on the Mediakwest website and here’s some further research about the history of the project by a user on the Modo forum. Nonetheless, this is the first time we’ve seen it mentioned under its current name on a major industry site. 

Patricia De Wilde tells Cartoon Brew that Rumba is “animation software which helps to animate in a ‘kind of live’ way, for example, imagine you’re doing the animation and right away you can see the result. […] The reason for developing it, deep down, is that we are producing Mike one hundred per cent in France where the costs are higher than a lot of other countries, meaning we have to be much more efficient in the output so that we can compete cost-wise. So the only way to be efficient is to have the better software that is more fine-tuned and customized to your production.”

No information is available yet as to whether the software will be released commercially or will remain an in-house tool. For now, you can watch a demo of the software on YouTube and read the full article on Cartoon Brew.