TV Paint

Computer assisted animation : comfort, versatility and freedom

TVPaint Animation is a 2D software based on bitmap technology. Thanks to this technology, you can animate natural renderings (gouache, watercolor, oil painting, crayon, pen…) traditionaly (image by image).

TVPaint Animation doesn’t impose a graphical style nor a workflow. Feel free to mix animation on paper and digital animation, do rotoscopy, use different software or simply make your project with TVPaint Animation entirely.

Full animation with TVPaint Animation

By combining Wacom© tablets technology (Cintiq, Intuos…) and the power of TVPaint Animation drawing tools, you will find all the advantages of paper animation without its drawbacks. Draw, animate et instantantly play your animation thanks to the remote : the time where you lost time with tedious line-test is over.

TVPaint Animation contains all the necessary tools to animate without a paper stage : management of the layers and the images, light table, rotative workspace, image library that can store references and model-sheets, guidelines with vanishing points to make animations in perspective…

Various functions will also ease navigation in the images in your timeline, such as bookmarks and image marks (whereby you can mark keyframes).  And thanks to the flip panel, you will be able to customize the preview of your animations by setting up your own shortcuts.

Finally, you can use the out of pegs that allows you to temporarily adjust the Light table display of your drawings, through moving , rotating and scaling. This feature makes it much easier to do inbetweening on separate parts of a drawing. It works just like it used to be done on paper by taking the drawings off the peg bar. This is the essential function for animators, inbetweeners and cleaners !

Animate on paper and TVPaint Animation

Colors and textures

TVPaint Animation offers three different filling tools. Each of them has their utility depending on your needs.

• The Color & Texture Generator layers (Professional Edition only) have lots of advantages which will make colorization of a lot of animated sequences easier and faster, and even if your lines are unclosed or drawn with a pencil.
You can also generate libraries of indexed colors. Then, if you change your mind about the color of an element, changing it will be a piece of cake. Besides their facility to colorize image sequences, CTG layers can also apply a texture tracking on these elements, to give more life to your animations.

• Another tool, located in the Filled free hand tool, will optimize the coloring step. This feature is called “Fill inside” and allows you to circle quickly a zone to color : it is really useful, especially if your characters have a lot of details.

• Finally, you can also use the paint bucket with many different parameters to configure. Using the option to fill on a separate layer, you can conserve the original lines on one layer and put the coloring on the next.
You could even avoid the “holes” from an uncomplete line, in order to fill a zone, wihout overflowing. The “Auto pick color” feature combined to the Light table will allow you to pick up colors from the previous image and then, fill a zone in the current image.

Thanks to the mask and the papers (textures), you will be free to add textures on a different layer.

If you wish to have advanced color renders, don’t hesitate to read our solution “Drawing & Illustration“, which will learn you more about the drawing tools possibilites.

TVPaint Animation imports very easily any video in most(all?) of the common formats (avi, mpeg…). Importing a video or an image is really easy : a simple drag and drop into TVPaint Animation. These videos will then be placed into an animation layer as an images sequence. Thanks to this system, you could add layers above the layer containing the video and draw your key images, without affecting the original video.

And thanks to the custom brushes’ “Smear source” mode, you will have an easy solution to give a crayoned or painted aspect to your videos. It’s also possible to mix video and animation. For example, you can integrate a person filmed before a blue background into a cartoon. You will obtain this result by combining the Keyers effects of TVPaint Animation Professional Edition to the animation layers.

With TVPaint Animation , feel free to merge techniques :

• make animated characters interact within live-action sequences ;
• made stunning rotoscoping ;
• import 3D references (as videos) to animate 2D characters on complex camera moves ;
• animate 2D effects on 3D sequences ;
• etc.