TVPaint Animation 11 : ask all your questions here !

[Paul Fierlinger]

Animark, What is it that you can do in Picture Palette that you miss in the Library? How would you imagine picking up the colors off the images without using the pipette when one does other things with the cursor while handling the images? You can indeed cut sections of images from your project window and paste these into the library, or do I not understand your question?

Sandra also misses having both color panels you mention opened at the same time. Apparently it creates conflicts with some of the new features -- programming seems to be such a house of cards.

You can sort pictures by renaming them alphanumerically... I also would like to see the possibility of just dragging them around, but I guess this also requires time so the renaming is a temporary workaround. I got myself into the habit of renaming images at the point of importing them to my HD. When I create a Save, I right click in the naming window to find the previous save and just add a number to it.

[Animark]

Hi Paul,

yes, that's the point. I want to get directly the color without using the pipette. But I also know, that it is a conflict with others things you can do with the mouse and the pictures in the library. (Ahhh, I am not sure if you can do anything with the LMB in the library.) The mixer panel has an option to choose between two different mouse behaviours, but I am not sure if this would make sense in the library. At all, it is not a great thing to use a shortcut for the pipette.

One of the great advantages of the picture palette is, that it is independent of the projects you're working on. I am not sure, if the library could be used in that way or if you always have to import your models etc. to every projekt file you are working on. Is there a "global" and a "local" function? That is difficult to find out, when just playing with the demo of 11 and not beeing able to save (what is OK for a demo). Another nice advantage is to zoom very close to palette-picture and pick the pixels colors. The library seems to be zoom-limitated to 200%.

All my critic is viewed from my personal workflow as an independent animator working only on own little movies and illustrations. I never have an industrial background in mind and it is often possible, that there is a basic conflict between these working concepts. Big production team planning vs. mostly beeing intuitive and spontaniously creative.

[Paul Fierlinger]

The Library is embedded in the project, which is a wonderful concept and stays in view when you switch between clips, which PP could not do.. You can also drag images from your HD into the Lbrary and you can batch copy images from one Library and paste them into another one. When you RMB directly on top of an image you'll get an option to Create a new project from this image. This is even simpler than it sounds. Once you click, the image instantly becomes a project window with no fuss attached. As soon as you have no need for it, you delete it -- no popups asking you if you are sure etc.You can also create a custom brush from the image the same way and just paste it into your brush's bin for future references.

All my critic is viewed from my personal workflow as an independent animator working only on own little movies and illustrations. I never have an industrial background in mind and it is often possible, that there is a basic conflict between these working concepts. Big production team planning vs. mostly beeing intuitive and spontaniously creative.

I see TVPaint as the foremost animation software that caters to those needs and workflows. Even though we make a living with our films, we also make many these days in our own production and I see no difference in the workflow between the two.

Viewing the software from this perspective has made me a lot more tolerant of it's foibles and idiosyncrasies over the years. The fact is, our occupation is a tiny, tiny niche market that will never support a large software production outfit. It's a boutique shop rather than an industry (BTW, I heard that ToonBoom just had to lay off 70 employees; is it true?) From this perspective I can live with having to work with constant WIP upgrades. By purchasing upgrades we not just buy what comes with the upgrade but our money supports what's going to be further done to finish it. It's either that, or hire 70 people and go broke. I don't want to loose TVP.

[Animark]

The Library is embedded in the project, which is a wonderful concept and stays in view when you switch between clips, which PP could not do..

Really? My PPalettes stays where they are while I can swith between clips and projects the whole time. I think it would be nice to have something like a global library in addition to the "local" project stored ones. OK, if an upgrade is about investing in potentials, than it has great potentials . But for the moment I have to check, if an upgrade fits my personal use - and I check this very carefully.

[Paul Fierlinger]

Yes, I forgot about PP's behavior, and you are right. But there is a difference. If I dropped an image then Sandra kept getting a popup telling her it's not there. What I like about the library is that it is self contained. If you upgrade you will soon find out that the library does the model sheet job far better than Picture Palette.

[Padruig]

I have a question about instances in TVPaint 11. I am looking for the "Transform an Exposure into an Instance" and "Transform an Exposure into an Empty Instance" commands. Are these commands gone from 11 or moved to a new location? I can't find them anywhere, they don't seem to be listed in the keyboard shortcuts. They used to be found in the Animator Panel in 10.5. I can get that functionality back by exporting the Animator Panel from 10.5 and importing it into 11. I don't like how new instances are set before or after my current frame and that it adds to the overall length of a scene in 11.

For the most part, I do like the changes made and am excited to upgrade soon! Cheers and well done.

[dogsma]

The Library is embedded in the project, which is a wonderful concept and stays in view when you switch between clips, which PP could not do..

Really? My PPalettes stays where they are while I can swith between clips and projects the whole time. I think it would be nice to have something like a global library in addition to the "local" project stored ones. OK, if an upgrade is about investing in potentials, than it has great potentials . But for the moment I have to check, if an upgrade fits my personal use - and I check this very carefully.

I agree with you about PPalettes ease for reference and color picking without using the picker tool and the way we could save each into our own categories. When I am painting a figure from Paul that hasn't shown up in a while I knew exactly where to go in my files for my color profiles pasted with that character. I am getting used to the Library but feel I have to fumble around a lot. I see why Paul likes it for animation but ..but... but PPalette had it all simplified and color based reference for me.

[Paul Fierlinger]

Discussing this just now with Sandra and having her show me how she used to do things back when PP was still available to us and how she has to do things differently in Library, I see the discrepancies as a very minor issue; not so much how Library can't do what PP used to do, but that Library makes the user adopt a different file management path but ends up giving the same result -- almost click by click. What I observed was that one ends up with the model sheet in two places:
1. Inside the project's library where it lives forever.
2. Saved inside a dedicated folder on a HD, where the folders are delineated by topics, just the way one would do with PP.
This, in my view gives you the advantage of having two places to go to when you need to go back in time to fish out a model sheet.
So it's a question of adopting a new pipeline -- like finding your way to new stores when you move to a new house.

[habashtvpaint]

I have a question about instances in TVPaint 11. I am looking for the "Transform an Exposure into an Instance" and "Transform an Exposure into an Empty Instance" commands. Are these commands gone from 11 or moved to a new location? I can't find them anywhere, they don't seem to be listed in the keyboard shortcuts. They used to be found in the Animator Panel in 10.5. I can get that functionality back by exporting the Animator Panel from 10.5 and importing it into 11. I don't like how new instances are set before or after my current frame and that it adds to the overall length of a scene in 11.

For the most part, I do like the changes made and am excited to upgrade soon! Cheers and well done.

Hi Padruig,
"Transform an Exposure into an Instance" in TVP 10 Pro = "Break Instance" under Image > Instances menu in TVP 11
You can assign a shortcut for this but I must warn you of a little confusing thing, when you go to shortcut, you'll find this command under the name Layer> Exposure: break
I find it confusing because of the use of instance and exposure, this can still get people mixed up

Shortcut01

Screen Shot 2015-02-08 at 9.16.47 am.png (17.7 KiB) Viewed 30548 times

Menu01

Screen Shot 2015-02-08 at 9.16.20 am.png (65.08 KiB) Viewed 30548 times

"Transform an Exposure into an Empty Instance" in TVP 10 Pro = this one is pretty much what you can do with "Clear" under Image menu in TVP 11, depending on your selection of instances or exposures

I hope this is useful!
Cheers,
A

[Padruig]

Ah yes, there it is! I knew it must be hiding somewhere. I still miss the transform to empty instance. The clear command only creates a new instance if you have auto-break active and I personally don't like this feature when animating and thus have it shut off. I can work around it though, I just like finding the little differences so I can better plan my workflow and shortcuts. Thank you for your help, much appreciated!

[Sewie]

...I still miss the transform to empty instance...

For the "transform to empty instance" you can make a keyboard shortcut adding "Layer: Clear" to the "Layer Exposure Break" shortcut. Holding either "at" or "ctrl", I believe.
Or you can import the Animator Panel into V11 (after you've exported it from 10.5) and copy paste the buttons into a custom panel in V11. Or just leave the whole panel in.

[Horganovski]

Is there any hope we might see Quicktime export supported in 64 bit TV Paint on Windows at some stage? I see the warning that it's not supported in a 64 bit program, but I have After Effects, Maya and C4D here and all of those are 64 bit and export to Quicktime just fine. It's really handy for saving out a quick preview with sound without having to comp an image sequence in a separate program. I've tried the AVI options but they seem to use weird codecs that don't play very well in my media players (I've tried VLC and Keyframe MP).

[Lars K]

Heya, first of all, I absolutely friggin love TV Paint, and I'm super excited about the new version. The more I learn about the program, the more I love it.

Fanboying aside, I have two small questions.
I just made the move to pro, so layer modes are new to me. I was playing around with storyboarding and learning the project timeline, when I decided one of the beats needed a bit of a color, so I add a new layer and set it to overlay, do the fixing, and merge. Huh, strange, it does not look like it used to anymore.
I try merging in a few different ways. No go. I try using the Image Source effect in overlay-mode and apply the upper layer to the bottom one, and it looks more different than ever. I try applying the display or the clip to an empty layer; no go. Still looks different yet.
The only thing that worked was rendering to a new project, but I'm using a camera, so that gets a little in the way. So far I've gotten like 4 or 5 different-looking results with the overlay using different merge-modes and the image source effect.
Am I misunderstanding something here? Is it a bug, or a mistranslation? I suspect the fault is mine, but I'm having a hard time figuring out why. Shouldn't I be able to apply the changes I've made to the layer below, or flatten the image?


The second question is more of a workflow question. I'm still rather new to animating in general, so please bear with me.
Say I'm happy with the storyboard, perhaps make it into an animatic, and from there want start to make a finished animation. Now I got a bunch of clips with superfluous cameras and large blank areas around the edges, and also a bunch of clips with inconsistent pixel resolution from all the different zoom levels of those clips WITH cameras. And it's got a fairly low resolution overall, since they're just there to suggest, not look pretty.
Are there any preferred way of going about working over these? I discovered Image Source could load other open projects, and found that was pretty neat, but then I would lose the clips/scenes setup and the camera stuff.
Should I just upscale the entire project to accommodate the closest zoom and work from the same file? That sounds bad for the linewidth.
Are the scenes/clips there mainly for storyboarding and simple animations and not for more complex projects, so I should really just split the whole project up into more manageable chunks manually after I'm done?
Or perhaps there's a way to (I doubt it) work with the contents (cameras, clips, ...) of another project, kind of like linking or appending in Blender (or AE I think may do this?), making some sort of a meta-project that references a whole bunch of external or internal project files - often with different resolutions - and let you compose them?
Currently, my money's with chopping up the whole project into a whole bunch of smaller projects as far as practicality go. And I guess using another program for composing and maintaining the entire project?

In any case, it's nothing I can't work with. Just trying to learn how TVPaint works!


Thanks for making an awesome program!

[Sewie]

Heya, first of all, I absolutely friggin love TV Paint, and I'm super excited about the new version. The more I learn about the program, the more I love it.

Fanboying aside, I have two small questions.
I just made the move to pro, so layer modes are new to me. I was playing around with storyboarding and learning the project timeline, when I decided one of the beats needed a bit of a color, so I add a new layer and set it to overlay, do the fixing, and merge. Huh, strange, it does not look like it used to anymore.
I try merging in a few different ways. No go. I try using the Image Source effect in overlay-mode and apply the upper layer to the bottom one, and it looks more different than ever. I try applying the display or the clip to an empty layer; no go. Still looks different yet.
The only thing that worked was rendering to a new project, but I'm using a camera, so that gets a little in the way. So far I've gotten like 4 or 5 different-looking results with the overlay using different merge-modes and the image source effect.
Am I misunderstanding something here? Is it a bug, or a mistranslation? I suspect the fault is mine, but I'm having a hard time figuring out why. Shouldn't I be able to apply the changes I've made to the layer below, or flatten the image?

...

I suspect you ran into the same problem I did some time ago.

[Paul Fierlinger]

I wonder if you haven't opened a CTG layer...