how fast do you colour?

[leszczynska]

Hello everyone,
This is just a question out of curiosity, as I'm trying to figure out a pipeline for a project: how many seconds of animation roughly can you colour a day using TVPaint?
I know it's a very vague question, so let's say a day is a regular office working day (8hours), animation is on twos and you're colouring one character that requires colour palette of 10 different colours.

I realise the answer may still vary a lot depending on how much the character is moving, the line quality, the method you choose to use (CTG or Bucket Fill), how experienced the colouring artist is, and so on, but I'm only looking for a rough average estimate to help with a schedule and I thought it may be worth asking as many people here have a lot experience with that.

Thank you!

[slowtiger]

How about a real test? Post some 2 sec of animation and a colour model, and we all can have a try. (Doesn't have to be a real character from your project.)

[D.T. Nethery]

I think that's a good test . Take a short section of animation , maybe 2 - 4 seconds , one character with an average number of colors. Time yourself .

Let's say it's 3 seconds of animation ON 2's ... 36 drawings . Start coloring and keep a timer running (pause it if you get up to take a break) . At the end of coloring in the 36 drawings , how long did it take ? That's how many colored frames you can average per hour .

I think you can then extrapolate out from that number , keeping in mind that you may go a little slower for a more elaborate character with more colors or go faster for a simpler character with less colors . Obviously if a scene has 3 character layers in it instead of just 1 character layer you need to take your average time and multiply it by 3 .

Also, as with any repetitive task, you can probably count on getting faster as you do it more . Let's just say for example that early on in your production you might be able to average 10 fully colored frames every hour, but a couple of weeks into this process if you're doing it every day you may find that you are able to push out double that number of frames as you find shortcuts and are forced to "work smart" because of looming deadlines.

[meslin]

Here are some things I've done in the past to improve my coloring speed by at least 2x:
- Change the scribble brush size to work with the algorithm. Fill largest regions first (exclusions usually).
- Assign keyboard hotkeys to each color swatch. Make a custom panel with the swatches (including exclusion). Put the shortcut keys close to each other, and close to the "prev/next instance" keys. (no re-positioning hands)
- As I've stated in at least five other threads, use a mousewheel or other jog wheel to go between instance heads, preferably something you can use with your non-dominant hand's fingers on the color swatch keys. The Nostromo N52 was perfect for this, but the mouse wheel on mine broke (after eight years of heavy use). Have switched to a left-handed Razer Naga gaming mouse with a piece of tape over the laser.
- Once you start to get confident with how the algorithm works, turn off the lightning bolt icon ("live update" thing) on the CTG layer so you don't have to wait for it to calculate before adding more scribbles. Do that at the end.

Some images of hardware that can speed up repetitive animation tasks considerably. For the record, the detents are not firm or precise enough on any of these devices for my taste. I would rather a knob similar to a modern washing machine (the kind that will spin endlessly but stop very firmly on each setting). Most jog wheels are for people moving in 10, 20 units at a time, whereas an animator often goes back and forth between 1-3 stops.

[leszczynska]

Thank you all suggestions and tips that I’ll keep in mind, but I don’t really have any animation to test on as I’m only in a planning stage (maybe I should, to estimate better). Or, indeed any random finished animation in TVPaint kicking about to use as slowtiger suggests. I've only started using this program a month ago myself and focused mainly on exploring what it can and cannot do, not actual animating

It’s not about averaging myself out, but a bunch of people in a studio with different level of experience (that as you say will surely rise as the production goes on).

Just a boring type of question like: if you personally (as experienced TVPaint users) were asked to colour let’s say: 10 seconds of TVPaint one character animation in 8 hours would your response be more like: “yeah, no problem” or “no way, impossible”?

I know that doing that kind of numbers is never 100% accurate because there’s too many things that vary from shot to shot, so I’m not trying to find a definite answer, just an informed guess. Thank you all again

[D.T. Nethery]

Just a boring type of question like: if you personally (as experienced TVPaint users) were asked to colour let’s say: 10 seconds of TVPaint one character animation in 8 hours would your response be more like: “yeah, no problem” or “no way, impossible”?

You already partially know the answer to this : it depends on the complexity of the character . Also, is the 10 seconds of animation ON 1's (240 frames) or is it ON 2's (120 frames) or a combination of 2's and 1's so it sort of averages out to around 180 frames. Obviously it is possible to paint 120 frames in half the time it takes to paint 240 frames .
But let's just say it's all ON 2's , 120 frames in total.

Is it 120 frames of a character like this :

smurf.png (27.12 KiB) Viewed 29247 times

(simple outlines, three colors = Black (pupils/eyebrows if those weren't drawn solid black on the clean-ups) Blue , White , not including inside mouth and tongue colors if there is dialogue, so possibly five colors)

OR 120 frames of a character like this :

chihiro-yubaba-spirited-away.jpg (95.38 KiB) Viewed 29247 times

(I'm counting around 20 colors on Yubaba, with many small , delicate areas to fill and keep track of) .

10 seconds on 2's (120 frames) in an 8 hour work day means 15 colored images per hour , one every 4 minutes. With the Smurf, I would say no problem .
A different situation if it's a more complicated character with delicate line work and many small color areas to be filled (and you have to constantly flip back and forth to check that you're filling them consistently, so there are not any color pop-offs )

[leszczynska]

Thank you
For clarity, in my previous post I was referring to my original post:

I know it's a very vague question, so let's say (...) animation is on twos and you're colouring one character that requires colour palette of 10 different colours.

[meslin]

If you are planning with metrics, my guess is that the "average number of fill regions per frame" would be a useful one.
Consider a palette of 10 colors that is used to fill 10 total regions per frame, vs a two-color palette to color 101 dalmatians.

[D.T. Nethery]

Here are some numbers for you based on a job I just did.

The scene was 208 frames , a combination of 1’s and 2’s (a total of 152 drawings).

One character layer , but a somewhat complicated character , 18 colors on the palette . A lot of small areas to fill. Used the CTG tool.

It took me 12 hours to color all 152 images which included doing a careful frame-by-frame Final Check for color pops (found a few and had to correct those frames. )

That worked out to an average of 12.6 drawings colored per hour.

[leszczynska]

wow, thank you so much!
I'm flattered you remember about that thread and bothered to write all that down for me ♥

[D.T. Nethery]

Here are some things I've done in the past to improve my coloring speed by at least 2x:

- Change the scribble brush size to work with the algorithm. Fill largest regions first (exclusions usually).

After a recent TVPaint tutoring session I think this point about "working with the algorithm" could be emphasized and explained more in the User Guide and video tutorials. Filling in larger regions first with a larger scribbles brush size and then smaller regions with a smaller scribble brush will tend to keep colors from over-spilling into adjacent color areas. It's not necessarily intuitive for when people start using the CTG tool and some users get frustrated by the colors constantly over-filling into adjacent areas.


Related to this , I would still like to hope that Peter Wassink's suggestion (from 2015) to add "invisible paint-to lines" to close gaps would be added to CTG. See here:

viewtopic.php?p=86330#p86330

"The request is to add a "Close gap tool" in the CTG Speedfill tool panel
So you can simply and quickly put thin UI lines to close off leaks.
The lines (like the squiggles) will not be visible in render or when the CTG layer is off or inactive"

- Assign keyboard hotkeys to each color swatch. Make a custom panel with the swatches (including exclusion). Put the shortcut keys close to each other, and close to the "prev/next instance" keys. (no re-positioning hands)
- As I've stated in at least five other threads, use a mousewheel or other jog wheel to go between instance heads, preferably something you can use with your non-dominant hand's fingers on the color swatch keys. The Nostromo N52 was perfect for this, but the mouse wheel on mine broke (after eight years of heavy use). Have switched to a left-handed Razer Naga gaming mouse with a piece of tape over the laser.
- Once you start to get confident with how the algorithm works, turn off the lightning bolt icon ("live update" thing) on the CTG layer so you don't have to wait for it to calculate before adding more scribbles. Do that at the end.


Animation Timeline Devices with Detented Wheels.png
Some images of hardware that can speed up repetitive animation tasks considerably. For the record, the detents are not firm or precise enough on any of these devices for my taste. I would rather a knob similar to a modern washing machine (the kind that will spin endlessly but stop very firmly on each setting). Most jog wheels are for people moving in 10, 20 units at a time, whereas an animator often goes back and forth between 1-3 stops.

[Hironori Takagi]

Wrong post so I will delete it.

[Hironori Takagi]

This post is incorrect and will be deleted.

[Hironori Takagi]

Regarding the invisible coloring lines, an application I used before called animo adopted it, and I talked to the development of TVPaint about whether it would be possible to combine it with the CTG layer function.
(At that time, I think it was said that it would be difficult to realize.)
In Japanese production, this method is not very popular due to the speed of coloring work, but I think there is a need.

[Xavier]

All of you, I want to see you drawing and painting !!