About the usual 'Photoshop' related requests

[Lukas]

Meanwhile...Photoshop is adopting animation tools.

TVPaint is still way ahead with very specialised animation tools, but Photoshop has all the stuff a lot of people usually ask for in TVPaint. Some stuff has been asked for again and again, such as layer groups, ability to drag outside of canvas without losing pixels, keyframed-FX (opacity/transform) that aren't baked, real masking and...an eraser ( ).

I'm all for some competition and hope TVPaint will keep up with Adobe and become even better! So I'm hoping these requests get some attention again.

I did a real quick test in Photoshop and quite liked it because I like the drawing tools in Photoshop, although in production I'd probably stick to TVPaint for now
http://lukaskrepel.tumblr.com/post/1043 ... nimate-the" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[neonnoodle]

Animating in Photoshop is do-able but not particularly fun for anything longer than a short loop. The scrubbing/flipping is slow and choppy, it usually takes a long time for the frames to cache. There's no scrubbing audio so any proper sound-sync is out.

However, there are some neat things you can do via the Smart Object system, which makes PS similar to Flash. You can have loops inside other loops. You can take a bunch of animated frames, collapse them all into a Smart Object, and then translate that loop across a path on the screen (like a character walking, for example). Then, if you open up the Smart Object and edit it, when you return to your document, the "symbol" will have updated, just like in Flash.

This is very powerful since it allows for the full raster capabilities of PS (including non-destructive adjustment layers), but the nested and iterative symbol power of Flash.

[schwarzgrau]

The animation toolbar is a great plugin and I recommend it everybody which can't afford buying TVPaint, but got Photoshop anyways. Stéphane Baril did a great job on it.
My biggest concern is, that if you going forward or backwards some frames, you still need to select the corresponding image. But that's not Stéphanes fault, I guess it's not possible to do the programming for such an action inside Photoshop.
In CS6 the plugin didn't create video-groups, which made it impossible to use. I wrote Stéphane an email a few weeks ago and as luck would have it he replied a few minutes ago and sended me this video.

If Adobe would like to, they could be a big competitor to TVPaint, but they are to busy integrating useless stuff like cg rendering in Photoshop. Like they're out of usefull ideas. And still no animation support, even if it could be that easy. So I guess Photoshop will never be as usefull as TVPaint for animating, than even if they try to integrate animation one day, Photoshop will then already be a bloated battleship, filled with useless functions and propably to slow to animate with.

Oh and by the way really nice animation Lukas.

[Sewie]

We could start a separate thread with wannabe TVPaint software/plugins.
I found this film on facebook about new 2d tools in Blender (which is 3D software by origin):

[schwarzgrau]

Really interesting, especially the scene overview starting at 01:54. I'm a blender user and never noticed you can use the grease pencil to animate.
But it looks to me like something, which wouldn't be used that much, outside of storyboards and animatics, since the whole structure of blender isn't build for it and even in the example it looks rather complicated.


Autodesk Sketchbook 2015 got an animation-feature too, but it's in the early stages of development and it seems nobody knows if it will be developed more.



by the way: he obviously doesn't show how painful it is to remove a frame and stuff like this.

[Lukas]

My biggest concern is, that if you going forward or backwards some frames, you still need to select the corresponding image. But that's not Stéphanes fault, I guess it's not possible to do the programming for such an action inside Photoshop.

Yeah there's tons of stuff in there that's not very counterintuitive (yet!). I'm confident this will become easier to work with in the future.

This brilliant film was animated in Photoshop (best thing at Annecy 2014 in my opinion):


He describes his workflow here:


It definitely shows situations where TVPaint would be much more effective. There's many pros and cons to each package.

[TVPaint]

Topic moved.

Not related to TVPaint Technical Support sub-forum.

[Lukas]

Maybe not, but certainly related to a lot of threads in there. Such as:

"Grouping layers,"
http://forum.tvpaint.com/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=2686" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

"Transform tool"
http://forum.tvpaint.com/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=8613" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

"See size of brush or tool as circle cursor"
http://forum.tvpaint.com/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=3790" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

"Scale/Move/rotate Multiple layers without FX Stack"
http://forum.tvpaint.com/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=8460" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

All things that are possible in PS, and hopefully someday in TVP too.