Studio Ghibli’s former animation software Toonz is being made open source (100% free) from 26th March 2016. It has “the ability to combine the hand-drawn animation with the digitally painted ones seamlessly”. It was also used to make Futurama.
The current owners want to make it “a world standard for 2D animation”, hence it’s becoming a freebie. The new open version will be developed under the name of OpenToonz.
Check out especially the Plastic Tool, and think how one might use that with a Poser comic-book mode render to speed up comic book production. And “apply brushes along the line” on both raster and vector. Yum, this will be very interesting to explore.
More official training and features videos here.