I hope no one minds if I bring up a suggestion for the User Guide that I
previously posted in this thread.. I still think this is worth adding to the User Guide. Believe it or not , some people still like to animate on paper or at least sketch out some drawings on paper , then scan the drawings to import into TVPaint. It doesn't have to be for animation. It could be a single image drawn on paper that the user wants to scan and then color it in TVPaint.
This is not a "mistake" as such in the User Guide, but is a suggestion for expanding on the explanation of one of the Color FX in the FX Stack: the
Black & White Converter .
This is how it currently appears in the User Guide:
https://www.tvpaint.com/doc/tvp11/index ... lack-white
Looking at this page most animators are going to immediately move on to the next page without really understanding how this Black & White Converter effect could be useful to them.
My suggestion is to explain in more detail how this effect can be applied to scanned animation drawings which have either red or blue or green under-drawing , and the user wants to drop out the red, blue, or green lines, leaving only the black lines. Red or blue tend to be the most commonly used colors for the underdrawing in animation and also comics.
It should be explained more clearly how the
Red , Green, Blue Channels in the Black & White Converter function similarly to how the "Channels" tab in Photoshop functions , because many users are more familiar with Photoshop and they don't know if TVPaint has the same or similar functions in every case.
Here is an example of what I am proposing should be demonstrated in the User Manual regarding Black & White Converter RGB channel adjustments. (a video tutorial would also be useful).
Let us say the user has drawn their animation on paper , using red pencil as the underdrawing for construction of the rough drawing, then knocking down the red lines using a kneaded eraser, cleaning-up on top of the red pencil lines with black pencil. When the drawings are scanned if a red channel filter is not used during the scanning , then the red lines will need to be removed when the drawings are imported into TVPaint.
This is easily accomplished by using the Black and White Converter (along with a combination of the Scan Cleaner Black and White , and optionally the Anti-Aliasing in the FX Stack).
click the images to view them full size
(for the demonstration I used the girl from "Journey Through Creativity")
(obviously, if the colored pencil lines are blue pencil or green pencil, use the blue or green channel set to 255
and the other two channels set to 0)
I was reminded of the need to add this explanation to the User Guide because I had the experience of explaining this process to an associate who was new to TVPaint and was unaware that this function was possible in TVPaint , so he was laboriously importing all his scanned drawings to Photoshop first ,creating a Photoshop Action to remove the red channel , then importing the drawings into TVPaint for Scan Cleaning , Peg Hole Registration, and Coloring. When I showed him there was no need to go through Photoshop first, he could do all of this easily in TVPaint, he was very happy to know about it , but remarked that he would never have understood he could remove the red lines (or blue lines , or green lines) from reading
the section on the Black and White Converter in the User Guide. There is a perception among some people that TVPaint tends to "hide" information from the user that could be presented in a clear, upfront manner, instead of assuming that another more experienced user will enlighten the new user or that the new user may accidentally stumble upon the information themselves by trial & error.
