TVpaint Tutorials

Here’s another little TVPaint workflow speedup, efx stack shortcuts.

Bring up the TVPaint effect stack, add a couple of efx plugins and save your effect stack.

It’s well hidden, but now you can go and add a new button and context click to edit it. Add a new action line and select “Set FXStack Bin” and there’s all the fx stack presets you have saved. You can also bind these to shortcuts from the keyboard command editor so you could have control+b bring up a blur efx or whatever effect or efx combinations you use a lot.

At first look, there doesn’t seem to be any way to do alpha channel masking in TVpaint, but there is… it’s just a little different than what you’r used to in other programs.

Let’s start by opening an image that isn’t to hard to mask so were not fighting 2 battles at once. Something like a rock against a blue sky for example.

Now that you have the image opened, make a duplicate of the main layer.

Go to your effects stack and first add the histogram effect. Then add a Black and White converter effect so it’s on top in the effects stack.

The process is now more or less the same as in other programs, except you’r using a standard layer as your alpha channel.

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I work with large brushes a lot and resizing them in 1% steps with the bracket keys take to long.

Here’s a tvpaint toolbar that allows you to setup different step sizes for brush size and opacity which are then saved. You can change the step sizes at any time.

kencincdecv1

Normally when you draw a stroke and hit undo the whole stroke is undone.

Hold down control and draw a stroke and each step layed down by the brush is put into the undo buffer.

Now when you undo you can undo the stroke in small steps. Nice for when you are about to draw something and you know there’s a chance you will overshoot, just back it off a few steps with undo for brush strokes.

Here’s a neat little tip buried in the TVPaint manual.

Click on the large color swatch from the color picker a or b pen.

Hold down control and click anywhere in your image.

The resulting color will be a blend between the current a or b pen color and the color you click on. Very nice for blending.

Here’s a small tvpaint george script that allows you to change the size, angle and invert state of the current paper:
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Here’s not so small TVpaint george script that allows you to pick a tool without opening the tools dialog:

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Here’s a small script to add a new layer and ask you to name it at the same time:

If you want the new layer added at the current position in the layer stack just delete the line that says tv_LayerMove 0


tv_ReqString "New Layer Name [Top]”
Parse Result LayerName

Here’s a small script to flip the background state from color to transparent, nice for some cutbrush operations.


// Get current mode
tv_Background
Parse Result BGState dummy dummy

If (CMP("color", BGState)==1)
tv_Background "check"
END

The default when you select a custom cutbrush you have created is to pop up the tools palette, presumably so you can adjust parameters of the brush. I allready do all this with keyboard shortcuts so it’s a bit annoying to have it pop up when I don’t need it.

Context click on the button for your brush and add a script action line below everything else.

Select:

Key:Interface: Close tools panel

From the set keystroke menu and that problem is gone.

Here’s how to recreate photoshops photo filter with TVPaint efx.

First create a copy of a layer, doesn’t matter which one and set that to blend mode grain extract.

Now you have a 50% gray layer which is overlay neutral, meaning it will be transparent in overlay mode.

Copy to clipboard and paste a new layer from clipboard.

Put this new gray layer into overlay blend mode.

Go to efx and select the color sliders plugin and voila, non-destrutive photo filter. You can easily add any tint to your underlying layers by experimenting with the color sliders in TVPaint.

The next update of TVPaint will probably have a new script command to set the blending mode of layers so then it will be a snap to wrap this all up in a script.

Here I’m just going to go over some things that makes TVPaint such a great painting program. TVPaint is a very advanced bitmap animation program, I don’t use it for that however. I use it as a normal painting program (because the brush engine stomps all over photoshop and painter) so I’m not going to go into the animation side of things.
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