Non-destructive keyframer FX

[TVPUSER]

As it stands any work you do with the keyframer FX won't show up in export unless you apply the FX
I can sense there would be a performance hit but why not add a cached prerender function like in After Effects?
Some projects do become heavy and having a one button way to preview it in Realtime would be nice too..

[D.T. Nethery]

As it stands any work you do with the keyframer FX won't show up in export unless you apply the FX
I can sense there would be a performance hit but why not add a cached prerender function like in After Effects?
Some projects do become heavy and having a one button way to preview it in Realtime would be nice too..

+1 . This is a good request. The more I have used After Effects for some projects over the past few years the more I miss this feature in TVPaint. It would be great to see a cached preview render like in AE , so we can see the effect(s) when previewing , but the effect(s) will not be baked-in rendered until Exporting to .MOV or .MP4 or .AVI or IMAGE SEQUENCE.

I suspect it may be that the current TVPaint engine can not do it (the developers will have to respond to let us know), but I certainly hope this will be a feature incorporated into the Next Gen version of TVPaint.

[slowtiger]

I had to use some more complex particle FX recently and noticed how complicated it is to re-use an FX in a different project.
1. There's two bins in the FX panel which is misleading. Saving and naming is confusing.
2. I can delete only a whole set of FX, not a single one in it.
3. A complex FX like the particle generator would benefit form a complete overhaul: more like nodes, dependencies, and the ability to save and load settings for each node separately, like a set of bitmaps all in one go instead of creating every particle one by one, or change a general setting for all particles just once for all (currently it's only possible with copying when creating a new one).
4. Profile curves in particles are most confusing, not named, not possible to re-use settings (it says so but doesn't work reliably).

[D.T. Nethery]

I had to use some more complex particle FX recently and noticed how complicated it is to re-use an FX in a different project.
1. There's two bins in the FX panel which is misleading. Saving and naming is confusing.
2. I can delete only a whole set of FX, not a single one in it.
3. A complex FX like the particle generator would benefit form a complete overhaul: more like nodes, dependencies, and the ability to save and load settings for each node separately, like a set of bitmaps all in one go instead of creating every particle one by one, or change a general setting for all particles just once for all (currently it's only possible with copying when creating a new one).
4. Profile curves in particles are most confusing, not named, not possible to re-use settings (it says so but doesn't work reliably).

I think this is several separate Feature/Improvement Request topics. But I completely agree with you the way it works now for complex FX stacks is confusing.

I would like to see the Saving and Naming of FX to the Preset Bin and the FX Bin overhauled to keep the FX Bin from becoming too cluttered. Being able to organize FX into Folders/Groups within the FX Bin would be nice (that was a previous request I made , but I believe the answer was that it is not possible under the current TVPaint engine , so I am hoping for that feature to show up in the Next Gen TVPaint)

Another thing that would be useful is when Naming and Saving an FX to the FX Bin sometimes I need to make only a small adjustment to the FX , which currently means saving it to the FX Bin as a new FX , by appending a new version number . This can cause the FX Bin to soon be overflowing with similarly named FX v1, v2, v3, v4 , v5 , v6 , v7 , etc. What I would like is the option to simply overwrite an existing FX if I make only a small adjustment to the FX . When doing this a warning would pop up as when you try to save a version of a file to the same location:
"An older file named " _____________" already exists in this location. Do you want to replace it?" and there is the option to Replace , Keep Both , or Cancel . (if you choose Replace, it simply overwrites the existing FX with the same name in the FX Bin. If you choose Keep Both it appends a new version number to it . ) Sometimes I do want to save multiple iterations of an FX , but often if I've only made a small adjustment , I just want to save the same FX again, but with the adjustment updated , rather than save multiple versions. (and have to manually delete previous versions that I no longer need) We can delete FX from the Bin only one at a time , but it would be nice to have an option to Delete a whole group of Selected FX to clear out the FX Bin of old , unneeded FX.

But I think I will need to add this as a few new topics to the Feature & Improvement Requests index.