TVPaint/Animation Ramblings

It does since version 9.5 or 10 (don't remember which). It's called "Out of Pegs."

chriscormieranimation replied to your post “Hi there! I just wanted to ask you something about inbetweening! You...”

I often have a layer with lowered transparency of my character beneath my animation layer. I can move that semi-transparent layer around for reference, and just turn it off when I'm done with it. Hope that helps. :)

It’s all about what you’re comfortable animating with!  I would not recommend animating in Photoshop but Flash is where I started and it’s still a solid animation program.  TVP was made to make animation though, unlike Flash.  It’s bitmap based and feels great to sketch in for rough animation.  It just takes a bit more effort to make things look good, because it’s really just for frame by frame work.

I seem to remember having trouble importing transparent PNGs into TVP a while ago and just composited them in using After Effects.  It was just painted foreground stuff so I traced a proxy of what it was and animated using that so I knew where it would be when I added it in later.

I had this problem of it omitting imported frames recently and it was because I had exported it at the wrong frame rate in the Photoshop Render Video options.  So try playing around with that if that’s what you’re using to export your image sequence.

Or, depending on what it is you’re bringing in, rename your files so that they’re sequential and put the frame numbers on the images themselves so that you still know where to put em on the timeline.

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!

Which program?  If you can export your keyframes as an image sequence then you can simply import them like I talked about here (last paragraph): http://tvpaintanimation.tumblr.com/post/111779696768/hi-awesome-blog-im-pretty-new-to-tvpaint-and

Absolutely! Hold down Ctrl+Alt to rotate the canvas and right click on this lil button down here for more options:

Ah it's been a while since I've done this haha! If you're importing from a camera, just make sure it's connected to your computer and go to Window > Video Grabber.  I just did to try it out and it automatically turned on my webcam!  Cool, I didn't know it could do that.  You can select any camera in the options there.

At the bottom there's an option that says "Apply in" and you're gonna wanna choose "Append" so that every time you hit the "Grab Input" button, it'll add on to your current frame with new frames.  "Current image" replaces the frame you're currently on with a new capture.  The "Length" option lets you tell TVP how long you want it to hold that frame for but the thing is, it'll just create four new frames with that image.  I prefer to just capture everything on ones, then time it out later so that it's easier to see the holds and keyframes in the timeline.

Figuring out a workflow can be tricky if you’re used to Flash and Toonboom but once you get what works for you it’s great!

Having a custom tool set is essential for me, I go into it here under Brushes.  You can make buttons for brushes, erasers, actions, etc.  Also play around with the hotkeys and even look through them and play around with em to see what some of them do!  There are a lot of really helpful ones.  For roughing out scenes, once I get the timing in it’s tricky to flip through the keyframes if you just have hotkeys set to go frame by frame, so I have “<” and “>” for that and I set “k” and “l” to flip between keyframes!  There are lots of little things in there to make your life easier.