Welcome to TVPaint Community forums !

Haven't been visiting TVPaint forum for awhile due to work schedule. I missed a bunch of good works from the forum!
For the pass few week, I have been reading some Astronomy articles and was inspired. Fortunately, I managed to save some time to work on this test. It is my first "Space" theme test. I used multilane camera to set up all the moving planes. After I had what is like, I also use TVP camera to handle the final layout. (I didn't put too much effort on animation this time, mostly is 2-3 frames animation). Feel free to give me feedback.

Oh, here is my little feedback/observation, don't know if you guys agree with me. As I was working on this test, I found FX panel at time it was hard to handle. There were many floating screens and also many adjustment on the values. I found myself miskey couple times. This is just my personal experience. (TVP is already really good, I just want it to be awesome! )

Here is the image before camera movement



File too large, Vimeo link here:
https://vimeo.com/293874675


<iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/293874675" width="640" height="465" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen></iframe>


lam giang

I really like this one! I would have loved to see the observer with a bit of animation.

Also thank you for your feedback on the FX stack.

Thanks @Benjamin Cerbai

It is TVPaint that makes animation a lot more fun! Thanks for the feedback! I will save sometime this weekend to work on some simple keyframe animations for the character. Thank you!

Hello guys, I want to add cigarette smoke to the observer. He moves his cigarette around. I try to use FX preset smoke FX. I can't figure out a way to track his smoke because the Curve profile is gradually linear smooth travel from one location to the next while I have only key frame poses/jumpy. I don't know how to approach it.
Any Ideas? Thanks!

Will you be at CTN? Perhaps I can help you there!

It's difficult to see what you're trying to do without seeing your character in motion, but here's a little test I did using the particle FX and a little 15 frame cloud I made for the animated smoke particle.

http://www.cartoonmonkey.com/lam/smoketest.zip

Where there are hand placed keyframes right next to each other in sequence, you're right. It makes the particle animation stop or jump. So my solution was in those traveling frames, to increase the number of particles greatly, unil the motion of the arm comes to a stop, then turn it down to a normal rate. 45 or so points per second.

Take a look at the included files, and load my smokeeffect1.bin into the fx stack. You may scroll through my hastily drawn example, and perhaps it will help you find a solution.

Always love to see the things you're working on!
-Chad

(Or you could simply hand-animate the smoke!)

Hi Chad,

Thanks for your tips and even providing a TVP file for me to into your FX set up! I am really lucky.
I won't be attending CTN this year. I wish I could and could meet up with you at the Booth. You were spending hours to teach meet TVP!!!

Yes, I tried for awhile, got frustrated and gave up on using the FX to achieving the effect. I hand animated the smoke. Then I realized the real cigarette smoke is very subtle and slow. The way I had it was too strong and the timing wasn't right, therefore I didn't show it.

Anyway, sometimes it is good to show not successful tests . Here ya go.

Again, thank you so much!

Hi Lam,

I really love the worlds you create.

Thank you for showing what you considered unsuccessful. I agree it can be useful as well as interesting and even fascinating to see.

I don't think your first attempt at cigarette smoke was that far off. The shape and movement reads more like fire/flame than smoke but with a little adjustment you would have smoke. This is a cartoon world and style plays a role in defining how its physics appear. If you only made what you have more transparent it could work. You could also think more along the line of cliche and make the pattern more serpentine or puffy like campfire smoke regardless of the environment (wind, movement, etc.). If I were to choose I would go with the serpentine pattern and increased transparency.

Hey Chad!
Thanks for the kind words and encouragement!

Yeah, I agree, it is a cartoony world. It is up to us to define it. The lesson I learned from this test is to make sure I now what I need in the scene before hand. The smoke effect this time is like an after thought/add on.

Making it more transparency and serpentine pattern will solve the problem. Cigarette smokes travel quite slow.

The other problem I had on this one is I still struggled with is the time frames + camera movement (how many drawings, how far the space between each drawing)

I guess thats the fun part of animation

Lam
Happy after Thanksgiving!