You can also create your own brushes and even import Photoshop brushes if you wish, but for most of my purposes the built-in pencils are perfect. They’ve gotten their look, feel, and pressure sensitivity dialed in just right in my opinion. Now it’s time to start drawing frames! TVPaint has some wonderful built in pencil tools. This is like having the best of both worlds. The developers of TVPaint also thought to include a “Timeline Notes” area above the dialog track, so you can make handwritten notes about the scene right in the software. With a little practice it will become very evident where the mouth should be open and where it should be closed. Well in TVPaint, you are able to “see” the sounds via a visible waveform indicator. Not only was that very time consuming, it was also very tedious. As animators we would use this to know what frame we had to have a character making a particular mouth shape. It was actually someone’s job to listen to all of the audio of the film and write down what frame number the word sounds fell on. Bye, Bye X-Sheets – Hello Waveform!įor many of you this is probably something you take for granted, but in the old days, to animate dialog we had to use what were called exposure sheets (aka “x-sheets” or “dope sheets”). If you are familiar with video editing programs like Adobe Premiere or Final Cut this is a very similar concept. Once you set the In & Out points, you can “scrub” through the timeline, hear the dialog, and begin to animate. This is essentially telling TVPaint how many frames the scene will be. Once you import the audio track you have to set “Mark In” and “Mark Out” points. ) Early character design sketches by Aaron Blaise of the ancestral ghosts in “Mulan.” I designed and animated the ancestral ghosts and he did an excellent job voicing the main ancestor. (Side note: I had the opportunity to work with Mr. First I imported the audio which was a recording of my son Dustin doing his best George Takei impression. In the video example above I animated a quick little bit of animation of a lion character. Aaron Blaise prefers to work big in TVPaint. It’s worth noting though that the frame rate and resolution are all settings that you can adjust to suit your needs. Also, since I am typically working on film projects, I work at 24 frames per second. This helps me achieve the feel of drawing on the large 16 field animation paper that we typically used in my Disney days.
HOW MUCH IS TVPAINT FULL
I like to use TVPaint in full screen mode on my Wacom Cintiq. There are often many ways to do the same thing and each animator may have their own preferences, but for me, these things get the job done. Just like Photoshop, TVPaint is deep, robust software. First off, I want to stress that this is my approach to using the software.