Hi I have a question. I want to get into TVpaint but I don't understand how to do a paying background! How do you do it? Or can I just make the backgrounds static and then export the film to flash and then pan the background there? And in After Effects or flash, if you open up a TVpaint film, does is show the layers or not? Sorry for all these questions, I just wanna know how to pan a background!
If you want to do a panning bg in TVP, first of all you have to make sure that THIS OPTION:
...is set to progressive because it caused me a major headache in school when we were learning how to do panning backgrounds and I kept getting all these weird gross lines in mine. You're gonna have one project for your main animation (a walk cycle or whatever) and another project with your background, with the width and height set to however big that image is. Import your bg into that one.
Then you're gonna wanna open Windows > FX Stack Panel in your main animation project window. Go to Add FX > Motion > Keyframer. Go to the Render tab, and where it says "Source", go down to "project list" and choose your bg. Probably a good idea to save it if you plan on coming back to this. Then go back to the position tab and go to the frame where you want your pan to start and click the little C here to make a keyframe:
Move your bg to where you want it by dragging the arrows next to X (horizontal) and Y (vertical), then go to where you want your pan to end, click C again to make another keyframe and drag your bg to make it pan. When you scrub through the timeline you should be able to see it move now.
If it looks good to you, now you just have to select your frames by dragging along the timeline in the space between the frames and the FX
and press the Apply FX Stack button in the FX panel, go to Options > Delete All aaaaand you're done! Woo!
Now that I've said all that, this is all well and good for simple bg pans and stuff, but I try to limit how much I use the FX stack because you have to apply the FX and it'll make those effects permanent. If you want to change something you have to go in and redo them so I prefer to save as much of that for After Effects as I can. AE doesn't recognize TVP layers but you can export your animations with transparency so that you can bring them in that way.
