Welcome to TVPaint Community forums !

Hi Dhomas,

a lot of what we created however was copied by Bauhaus and also TVPaint.

Well, I agree that Bauhaus was unfair with you (just imagine how it was with us ... try to steal the whole source code ).
On my side, I promoted your products through the website, emails and newsletters between 2007-2009 and made sure not to develop options that would be in competition with your existing plug-ins (for exemple, there is still no Picture Palette in the software ...).

Regardless of that, once TVPaint took over its own marketing/sales of their software, the market for us dried up substantially.

We always tried to promote your work and also help regarding your various technical questions.
I think the main reason for this is that Aura/Mirage (as well as your plug-in) were products originally designed for the TV broadcast industry and TVPaint is more and more designed for 2D animators.

that's simply, unfortunately, the (lack of) market that is TVPaint third party development.

As far as I know, the Lazybrush plug-in is selling well, but as explained above it's probably a product more dedicated to 2D animators.

The vast majority of TVPaint users are using pirated copies of TVPaint.

I don't think so ... This is something we really work on in various ways (regular upgrades, improvements, removing illegal links, blogs, torrents, etc ...)

dhomas wrote:I should add that contrary to what I've read in other places, we have a good working relationship with TVPaint... and there's no ill will felt towards them. The major wrongs that were done to us in the past were not the fault of anyone at TVPaint.

Thanks for adding this. We have good relashionships with you too and it was important to write this here.

And now for the record, my entry into dhomas' very belated (as is his wont) contribution to the debate about his products. I indeed offered $ 300 for the upgrade of Picture Palette which he delivered after a while, telling me that in the end there was nothing to it and that he had it done within a couple of hours, to which I answered with a request for a favor, since $ 300 seemed to be a little much for a couple hours of work, if in that case he could add the conversion of Backup to my order. He said he would after which followed more than a year of excuses for being busy on more important matters and I eventually gave up, bought a much better system called SmartSync for $ 45 and that was that.

As for Their (meaning dhomas') delivery of Picture Palette 64 for Sandra, They never delivered. As They say in Their post, things get lost, either in junk mail or perhaps even due to some untidiness in customer's file management or even theft of a computer or destruction of a house or the whole street. Sandra never got her PP and we (in this case i am talking about both Sandra and I) repeatedly asked Them (dhomas) to once more send a link to her PP so that she could move away from TVP 32 into 64. Once more, They kept repeating that it had already been sent, which is no reason why it couldn't have been sent again -- since it either had never arrived, or got lost in some other way. This is a matter of supplier to customer courtesy and all decent software producers have a built-in system to oblige. To this day, Sandra has never been able to use her portion of our $ 300 upfront payment. This is a simple fact and not a blabber and I see no reason for making excuses -- just please resend the damn link and the case can be closed.

This'll be the last from me on this topic...

Once again, incorrect information... here's is my original email with offer to Paul after I got Picture Palette working...

"I started working on Backup for you, but encountered an issue I haven’t had a moment to get back to. PP was finished though so I thought I’d mention that now. The ToolBox thingy I’ll look at next too. I’m kinda thinking while I’m fine with the $300 for PP that you originally offered, that I’ll throw in the other two if it’s not a huge hassle to get them working… and then later when you’re Slocum millionaires you can funnel something back to me of the extra."

This was my offer out of kindness and respect, not Paul's request for a favor. As it turned out, it was a huge hassle and I haven't returned to trying to resolve it. The process of building 64-bit plugins for TVPaint, required switching to a much newer build of our compilation software (many years had gone by), which did not handle moving the original source code over smoothly. It took a substantial amount of time to get that to work at all. Definitely wasn't a couple hours.

Major time saving capabilities we introduced to Aura/Mirage, particularly Toolbox (toolbars), were at some level natural progressions of the TVPaint software - albeit probably inspired by what we did. And maybe for TVPaint it was in some way a counter to Bauhaus (directly copying our idea) selling that functionality for Mirage. It doesn't matter anymore... we moved on from this whole mess following attempts by Bauhaus at lawsuits against us for continuing to sell ToolBox, after they copied it. Fortunately for us, we were able to laugh at all of the Bauhaus legal maneuvers because the allegations were so ridiculous they had no hope of getting anything to stick. And yes, I know how much it sucked for TVPaint with Bauhaus as well. We're thankful to not have had to get into the legal battles and huge expenses of such.

Fabrice, your efforts to promote our plugins was much appreciated. Again, we have no issues with TVPaint.

I believe this thread has worn out its usefulness and suggest it be closed, no?

Well, everyone wrote his point of view, so we can close it (if not, write me a PM).

@ Animark, we will work on something when possible.
The various exchange and discussions didn't hide your request.