TVPaint alpha channel masking masking and removing backgrounds

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 [...]

tvpaint toolbar to increment size and opacity in steps

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

Step undo for brush strokes

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 [...]

Blend between a/b color and picked color

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 [...]

TVPaint george script: Change paper parameters

Here’s a small tvpaint george script that allows you to change the size, angle and invert state of the current paper:

TVPaint george script: Select tools popup menu

Here’s not so small TVpaint george script that allows you to pick a tool without opening the tools dialog:

TVpaint george script: New top layer with name

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 If (Cmp(LayerName,”Cancel”) == 0) tv_LayerCreate [...]

TVPaint george script: Flip background state

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

Stop the tools panel popping up when selecting a custom brush

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 [...]

Photo filter with TVPaint

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 [...]

So what’s so special about TVPaint?

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 [...]