TVpaint Tutorials

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.

User interface not using standard windows drawing routines.

This is not a bad thing as some might think, everything works pretty much like any other standard windows program. Except that TVPaint is highly optimized and way snappier that for example photoshop.

Things like rotate canvas, zooming and painting with large brushes on large images have no lag unless you do something crazy, like paint with an animated brush set to best interpolation on a 4k image at 1000 pixels brush size or something like that. Point is that you’d have to try hard to notice any lag that sends photoshop and painter to their knees, how excatly they do it I don’t know, I just know that when I go back to photoshop now for technical photograhy editing I’m constantly annoyed by how slow it all is.

Powerful and easy to use brush engine.

To go over the whole brush engine would take to long so I’m just going to list the things that stands out. You have parameters like size, power (Flow), opacity, aspect ratio, angle etc.. All these can be bound to any combination of speed, orientation, Direction, Random, Pressure, Altitude, Azimuth, and Twist. Each one (Yes EACH one) have their own profile editor which is a curve (Line or spline modes) where you can tweak the reaction to whatever parameter the curve is controlling. For example you could bind Pressure to size and then edit the profile to match how hard or soft you want to press your pen. Since you can create curves you can tweak the profile to react just the way you want. You can also create the brush tip this way by drawing in a curve that controls the opacity of the brush tip to create bristle brushes, round or square brushes and other combinations. All the parameters has their own profiles that can be tweaked endlessly. You can then save your brush with all parameters stored.

Repeat this for the standard brush types of Airbrush, penbrush, mechanical pencils, oilbrush, pencilbrush, wetbrush, warpbrush (Like liquify), Specialbrush (Smearing and shifting), Textbrush and finally the cutbrush.

The cutbrush is a special case in TVPaint. basically what it does is allow you to draw a selection (Freehand, rectangle,ellipse) and it turns into the brush you can paint with. After you cut the brush you can tweak it endlessly, rotate, transform it, create an opacity profile and connect it to all the parameters like normal brushes and edit all the parameter profiles. The cutbrush is extremely useful for quickly drawing in perspectives. Draw a feature normally, cut it out, resize it and stamp it in again a little further away and you can quickly get tons of details in perspective. You can of course save the cutbrush with all parameters as a custom brush for later use.

Since TVPaint is an animation program, the cutbrush has one last feature up its sleave.. The animated cutbrush.

Simply create a new project (Can have multiple projects open) and add say 10 frames. Now draw an animation, for example of a bird flapping it’s wings, water waves, rocks, clouds what have you and select all the frames. Now if you cut a brush TVPaint asks you if you want to create an animated cutbrush. Now you can adjust the framerate of the brush, tweak all the parameters and their profiles and paint with an animation. The cutbrush can be set to respect the original colors, set to alpha, luma or hue so you can select your own colors, paint from foreground to background color or just affect the hue of the selected color.

In photoshop you can create a dual brush, in TVPaint you can create an animated brush with 1000 frames if you wanted and then connec it to all the brush parameters. Let’s see, 2 frames (Dual brush) or unlimited frame brush, you decide (And it doesn’t lag no matter how many frames it is)

Superior support for pen tablets.

In photoshop or painter for that matter, only some parameters can be bound to things like twist (If you have a wacom art pen), azimuth, angle and so on. In TVPaint any brush parameter can be connected to any tablet function. You can bind the size to twist for example, then tweak the profile for twist, invert it so the brush size decreases when you twist, the possebillities are endless.

The brush ghosting engine of course shows you all this in realtime (More about that later)

Spline drawing.

In photoshop you have the pen brush where you can draw standard bezier curves. TVPaints spline mode is like the PS pen on steroids.

3 point spline.

Drag and draw out a line, release and a curve between the start and end points of the line can be positioned.

Bezier spline.

Like photoshop, click to draw points, hold control to change the angle of curve handles.

B-Spline

Click between 2 points, then click and drag the line formed between the points to drag out a curve.

Circles and elipses.

You can draw circles and elipses like normally, but you also have 3 point and 3 point elipsis tools, very nice for perspective stuff.

Many tools to help with perspective.

The transform warp tool helps you with perspective by drawing a horizon line.

You have a 4 point perspective tool in the efx menu that is realy usefull. Mirror efx (Yes like Deluxe paint weee)

Painting and layer blend modes.
You have all the blending modes like in photoshop along with a bunch of others both for the current brush and also for layers. One blending mode in particular is awesome, Alpha Diff.

Ever had a brush in photoshop set to say 25% opacity and then painted over a previous brush stroke? Yep, the opacity adds up so you get ugly edges all over the place. With TVPaints Alpha Diff blending mode set to the current brush you can only paint to that opacity no matter how many times you go over the same area, I love that.

The most advanced brush ghosting ever, anywhere.

Brush ghosting is the display of the current brush as your current mouse/pen cursor. Photoshop has a primitive form of this. In TVPaint everything, and I do mean everything you do to your brush is displayed in realtime.

The current brush is shown, size, opacity etc..
The color of the brush is shown.

If you have a blending mode for the layer OR the brush the effect is shown in realtime. Say you have the brush in Add blending mode, the brush ghosting will interact with the current layer, same with every other combination of brush and layer blending modes.

In TVPaint you can have a brush paper, simply a texture you load that gives you a texture, that is also shown in the ghosting.

If you have a stencil on (TVPaints equivilant of a layer mask) then the ghosted brush will cut off when you go outside the stencil.

If you use a custom sampled brush (A cutbrush in TVPaint lingo) then it is show as is, not like in photoshop where you only see the outlined edges of the brush.

Bottom line is that you see the brush ghosted exactly as it would look when you actually start painting with it.

The built in scripting language, George.

Pretty much anything TVPaint can do can be scripted. This is not something like actions in photoshop. It is a real scripting language like javascript with variables, loops, expressions and all that jazz. You can create your own drawing functions and extend TVPaint with features it doesn’t have that you want. I moved over from photoshop and there was a few things I had gotten to used to that TVPaint did differently. No problem, I just whipped up a couple scripts and bound them to shortcuts using the shortcut editor and I was back in business. Why wait for a feature you want? Just code it yourself. The scripting language is not hard to pick up, it’s very similar to languages like javascript/vbscript/php and can be picked up in a couple of days if you have a little programming experience.

Powerfull efx system.
TVPaint is a very advanced pixel based animation program on top of the drawing engine, I don’t use that part since I do concept art mostly, but with that comes the need for some pretty hardcore effects (Plugins in PS lingo) For example there’s a whole particle effect system built in. Ever play games? All those fancy explosions and water, fog, haze, bloom and what have you.. that’s all done with a particle system.

You have all the useuall plugins like levels, curves, histogram, and some very advanced plugins like volumetric lights, a lighting engine like in a 3d program so you can place ambient, onmi and spot lights to light your scene dynamically and change it without redrawing your painting. Bump mapping and displacement mapping, perlin noise for sky and water effects. There’s hundreds of advanced effects.

Everything can be keyframed so you can create animated volumetric lights, animated particle systems and much more.
Support and responsive developers.

Even before I purchased TVPaint I was asking questions, one of my suggestions was implemented just like that in the next version. Later on I asked for the scripting menu system to be able to do submenus.. no problem in the next version it was there. Ask a question in the technical support forum and you’r guaranteed an answer the same day. Very awesome support team and the developers hangs out and answers questions. try that on Adobe forums and see what you get