Paul Fierlinger wrote:My strongly felt advice: Don't spend the money on a cintiq yet! Get an Intuos tablet 4 for just $300 or $400 and don't put paper on top of the tablet or any other analog-world crutches but spend a full week of concentrated practice drawing with the stylus on the tablet's wonderful slippery surface. It has to be learned like playing on a violin has to be learned (this is much easier). It's a new tool with which you learn to draw in new and better ways.
Well, you can buy a used Cintiq 12" for 600-700$ on e-bay, and actually sell it for similar price in case you don't like it - there is no risk in that...
Paul Fierlinger wrote:Give up the pencil feel, look, pleasure or whatever you find attractive about it since you want to join the digital age. Use directly the pen tool in TVP and not any of the pencil simulation plugins. You need to draw with a digital pen to take all the advantages this unique software has to offer.
I would agree about changing the idea of the feel, but well, if I need something to look like a pencil for the style of my animation, I would by any means want to achieve that. Of course, the best way is actually to draw on paper, but if there is no technical possibility to do so, I would rather look for any possible way to do it digitally. I don't agree that coming into digital age should limit the style...
Paul Fierlinger wrote:The pen tool in TVP behaves and looks exactly like a classical dippy pen the masters of drawing skills have used for centuries. The pencil was the unskilled person's substitute for a dippy pen. In the days before computers, we animators yearned for a tool that would free us from drawing with a pencil first and then having to trace the pencil lines with a dippy pen and ink (or brush and ink) on plastic sheets. What the Wacom tablet + TVP offers is the fulfillment of that wish and now every kid wants to know how to make their drawings look like pencil lines.
Yes, but it only saves you one step of cleaning-up with a pencil before using a pen. You still need to draw a rough with any rough/pencil tool before cleaning... Actually, after the cells were gone, the clean-up was done on paper and on most productions there was even no need to redraw it with a pen - the pencil clean-up was quite enough, so basically I don't see how TVP saves this particular step...
Paul Fierlinger wrote:It'll take you a week at the most to understand this and you'll never look back. Most of us who have been using a tablet for 10 years can't even draw on paper too well anymore -- and we don't need to.
Well, I'm after 10 years on a tablet but with TVPaint I'm happy now to work on a Cintiq, and most happy that I didn't loose my paper skills, and never would want to...
Paul Fierlinger wrote:I also love the fact that my hand never covers my view of what I am drawing -- on the contrary, the cintiq is worse than drawing on paper in that respect because the stylus is fat and the nib short which blocks one's view of where the nib hits the glass -- and the nib of course never has direct contact with the line because of the thickness of the glass.
Totally agree - this is the only thing in Cintiq that makes me a bit nervous - I don't understand why Wacom couldn't do a thinner stylus, that would look like a normal pencil. Glass thickness bothers me less, but I agree that it's not the same as drawing, but yet comparing to a regular tablet, I think it's much more organic... But it's probably a matter of personal feeling....
- how do I do that? I've scanned in or photographed some of my recent work, but the files are big and in all different formats. What are the steps to get the images here?
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and since I have tried and experimented with Pshop and iMovie, Flash, DigiCell, Pencil and looked at ToonBoom - the more costly TVPaint comes up a winner every time, so I think spending the more money here makes sense, too..
