Animation Studio testing out TVP for production

[koizu]

Hey guys,

My name is Mike Koizumi. A couple of months ago, I posted my animatic, "Joust", in the animation section. I've been a big fan of Mirage and TVPaint and I recommended it to my boss, so right now I am testing out the TVP Animation Demo to see if our studio might be able to use it to do animatics for production.

Some questions:

-Is there an easy way to do pans? For example, if I draw a spaceship; how do I move it around and set key frames? I took a look at the user guide but had a little trouble understanding what to do. For "Joust," I have pans in it but they're kinda "fake" pans. To simulate a pan, when I had a new frame, I would just copy the previous image and then move it slightly. It works but I know there must be an easier way.

-is there a way to do Alpha Channels like in Photoshop? We'd like to have our characters opaque over the backgrounds.

Thanks guys! I'll keep you posted on how my testing goes.

Mike

[slowtiger]

Pans: you need to use the FX stack to do this, namely the Keyframer effect. See part 14-9 of the manual. It took me some time to get the concept, but basically you define a source of what's moving (under the "render" tab) and set positions to keyframes. Don't forget to select a whole range of keyframes before you click "apply" because otherwise you won't see a thing. The nice thing is that you can save all the settings you made and re-use them later, even in a different scene.
(I still use another program if I want to work out a complicated pan, it's Anime Studio and has the advantage of showing stuff even outside the borders of the project.)

Alpha: Every layer you create in TVP is by default transparent, as in Photoshop. Every brush stroke you apply has 100% opacity (if that's the brush's setting).

[ZigOtto]

-Is there an easy way to do pans?

hi Mike,
idem Slowtiger, the better way is to draw/animate your scene in an "extra-size" secondary project,
(say double-length if an horizontal pan is planed), then, back to your main project, open the Keyframer_FX,
set the secondary project (the big one) as Source in the "Render" tab,
then, in "Position" tab, create a key at the 1rst frame, set the X value,create a key at the last frame, modify the X value,
finally, last step, "select all frames from Keys" and Apply the FX stack.
(don't miss to enable and tweak the Speed Curve to choose custom ease-in/ease-out as well).

-is there a way to do Alpha Channels like in Photoshop? We'd like to have our characters opaque over the backgrounds.

if your drawing is done in tvpaint, (via a wacom tablet), you just have to draw your character(s) on separated layer(s), and freehand fill (in White color) in "Behind" mode, so the lines will stay foreward.

btw, if you intend to stay on the 2D road, you could do much more than an Animatic with TVPA ...!