Hello! my unusually long introduction and questions
Posted: 13 Feb 2011, 08:27
Hey folks,
Hope life's going well with everyone. I'd like to introduce myself in a more personal manner than expected. I've been interested in TVP on and off for about 5 years now, signed up before and forgot my username/pass/email. I've been using Flash for about 10 years and animating professionally on and off for about 4 years.
I am also ready to throw in the towel on animating completely.
I find illustration programs are the only thing that grants me the ability to draw anything remotely attractive in the digital medium that rivals paper and pencil. Flash is the only widely used and viable program that I have enough knowledge of(currently). It is impossible to draw with fast, steady strokes as I can in my favored illustration programs; I can't sink into any ideas of my own anymore because the program limitations are too frustrating. The workarounds are relatively easy though more boring than watching paint dry.
I've gone to school for animation so I'm familiar with classical animation terminology; not always so familiar with technological lingo. With no time trial on the TVP Demo and months of free time on my hands, I really want to learn this program fully. However, like every time before.. small bugs/inexplicable happenings frustrate me to the point of completely and utterly losing my cool. Imagine: searching through many tens of forums, and tens of documents, trying to find a way to reset the default workspace; merely so you can have a recognizable place to BEGIN when learning a tutorial. I have spent an hour doing just that and once again felt that creeping feeling to give up.
I meditate and calm myself before attempting to learn anything. This helps to push away stress that immediately takes hold of the mind and body when experiencing frustrations of the past. I can only manage one hour of solid learning at a time when I am not making any headway. I can learn and practice an entire day when things are going fairly smoothly. Without a teacher, I am too often lost searching for one crucial problem for days, and NEVER finding an answer for it. This kills my desire completely and nearly did so again today with this demo. I decided to make this post instead.
Example of the issues hit today: I figure learning the interface would be the best starting point. After fooling with the interface initially, I screwed up the placement and can find no way to set up the TVP interface to be exactly the same as what's in the Interface Tutorial. While following along on a second monitor; I tried my hand at the Wrap tool, (he calls it "warp" in the tutorial; the tooltip says "Wrap"). In the example, the Wrap tool changes the perspective of the image, and can be applied to multiple/all frames. TvP will randomly decide that it does not want to apply this to a frame when scrubbing the timeline. After playing with it a bit, I've found that it will bug out because (I'm guessing here) the applied perspective is too extreme (even when the changes are very minimal). I will make a video capture and post it within a day to show what I mean.
I'll likely be asking a lot of questions, some will often be obvious. I've set up a livestream account that I still have to test (will post it within a day), in order to record and document problems. I hope this will result in a clearer explanation of issues.
I don't plan to make a post this long and personal again, so big thanks for anyone who takes the time to read and respond! I would love to make this work and will need the community if I'm to choose to buy this and continue animating. Best of luck with your works!
-JR
Hope life's going well with everyone. I'd like to introduce myself in a more personal manner than expected. I've been interested in TVP on and off for about 5 years now, signed up before and forgot my username/pass/email. I've been using Flash for about 10 years and animating professionally on and off for about 4 years.
I am also ready to throw in the towel on animating completely.
I find illustration programs are the only thing that grants me the ability to draw anything remotely attractive in the digital medium that rivals paper and pencil. Flash is the only widely used and viable program that I have enough knowledge of(currently). It is impossible to draw with fast, steady strokes as I can in my favored illustration programs; I can't sink into any ideas of my own anymore because the program limitations are too frustrating. The workarounds are relatively easy though more boring than watching paint dry.
I've gone to school for animation so I'm familiar with classical animation terminology; not always so familiar with technological lingo. With no time trial on the TVP Demo and months of free time on my hands, I really want to learn this program fully. However, like every time before.. small bugs/inexplicable happenings frustrate me to the point of completely and utterly losing my cool. Imagine: searching through many tens of forums, and tens of documents, trying to find a way to reset the default workspace; merely so you can have a recognizable place to BEGIN when learning a tutorial. I have spent an hour doing just that and once again felt that creeping feeling to give up.
I meditate and calm myself before attempting to learn anything. This helps to push away stress that immediately takes hold of the mind and body when experiencing frustrations of the past. I can only manage one hour of solid learning at a time when I am not making any headway. I can learn and practice an entire day when things are going fairly smoothly. Without a teacher, I am too often lost searching for one crucial problem for days, and NEVER finding an answer for it. This kills my desire completely and nearly did so again today with this demo. I decided to make this post instead.
Example of the issues hit today: I figure learning the interface would be the best starting point. After fooling with the interface initially, I screwed up the placement and can find no way to set up the TVP interface to be exactly the same as what's in the Interface Tutorial. While following along on a second monitor; I tried my hand at the Wrap tool, (he calls it "warp" in the tutorial; the tooltip says "Wrap"). In the example, the Wrap tool changes the perspective of the image, and can be applied to multiple/all frames. TvP will randomly decide that it does not want to apply this to a frame when scrubbing the timeline. After playing with it a bit, I've found that it will bug out because (I'm guessing here) the applied perspective is too extreme (even when the changes are very minimal). I will make a video capture and post it within a day to show what I mean.
I'll likely be asking a lot of questions, some will often be obvious. I've set up a livestream account that I still have to test (will post it within a day), in order to record and document problems. I hope this will result in a clearer explanation of issues.
I don't plan to make a post this long and personal again, so big thanks for anyone who takes the time to read and respond! I would love to make this work and will need the community if I'm to choose to buy this and continue animating. Best of luck with your works!
-JR
- here are some TVP teachers from different film schools..