Toonkit BTS ep.2: Sample Assets
A taste of Toonkit assets, Sample assets
Hello,
The star of our second Toonkit behind-the-scenes story is Sample Assets.
A Taste of Toonkit Assets: Sample Assets
Toonkit has hundreds of character and background sample assets.
Users can encounter sample assets when:
- Creating characters and backgrounds in the storyboard
- Adding an image node on the canvas
Why Do We Need Sample Assets?
There are two reasons behind the birth of sample assets.
- User Education
If there's one thing that matters most for making delicious food, it's the ingredients. The same goes for AI generation. To produce good image and video results, the ingredients that go into them are truly important. And the "character," being the centerpiece of animation, is arguably the most important ingredient of all, right?
Based on our long experience, however, for a character to appear consistently across images and videos, it needs to be fed into the AI model in a format known as a Turn3 or character sheet. But we know very well that unless you work in animation or a related industry, you probably have no idea what a Turn3 or a character sheet even is.
For those who are curious, a quick explanation: the image on the left above is a character sheet, and the one on the right is a Turn3.
So our first goal was to expose users to sample assets first — and frequently, every time they create a character — to help them recognize that "this is the kind of image you need." Of course, you'd still get results without including these images. But it's really disheartening when you pay to create something and the results don't turn out the way you hoped...! Our desire to help users generate even slightly better results is what these sample assets are all about.
- Reducing Churn
As mentioned earlier, good animation requires good ingredients. That's why, in some templates, the Toonkit service requires users to create characters in advance as part of the animation creation process.
The problem is that creating these characters consumes credits. Especially for animations with many characters, users would burn through all their free credits just making characters — before even getting to the cut images and cut videos. Users would end up spending their entire trial on preparation without ever actually creating the animation that mattered. As a result, this character creation stage saw a huge amount of churn.
We wanted to improve the drop-off at this funnel so that users could experience the full journey of creating an animation within their free credits. That's why we added sample assets that let users create characters without spending any credits. Since presets are limited in number, we wanted to at least give users the experience of choosing from characters across diverse genres and art styles — so we prepared as many sample assets as we could.
So How Is It Going Now?
Currently, more than a third of Toonkit users have tried or are actively using sample assets. And to our delight, the sample assets are being used quite evenly across the board. (For those of us who worked hard to create all those sample assets, this is truly wonderful news.) And while we can't share specific figures, the churn rate at the character creation stage has also improved significantly.
Wrapping Up
How did you like this story about the sample assets you may have passed by without a second thought? When a feature delivers results this good, we're genuinely thrilled too...! We'll keep working hard to build many more features that help our users! Please look forward to what's next~
See you again next time! Bye 👋