Welcome to TVPaint Community forums !

Hi-

I'm having a lot of trouble finding good pencils for TVPaint. I thought I'd share pencils I love from other programs, to see if anyone has good recs for something similar. I like a pencil that can pull double duty, where it can give you a solid line for good linework, but if you tilt or make the brush size bigger it can give you a nice soft texture for quick shading.

In Photoshop, the pencil that does this for me, is Kyle's Animator's Pencil.



In Clip Studio Paint, the pencil that does this for me, is the SU Cream Pencil.



Anyone use these & have some good recs? I love TVPaint but my inability to find a perfect pencil is limiting my usage of it. Happy to pay for brushes too if there's any creators you like that are selling good brushes.

i have made many many attempts and i have come up with a few nice pencils and brushes.
But i find its hard, with the current paint engine of tvpaint, to fully close the gap to truly natural feeling oldmedia tools.
A lot can be achieved by using the animated cutbrush in clever ways, yet there are limitations to the number of parameters you can combine and so to what you can get out of it.


Here is a collection of some of mine and some from others hope you find something you can use...
in the end i comfort myself with the notion that line quality is not the most important thing, well it shouldn't be anyway.

Peter Wassink wrote: ↑17 Nov 2023, 11:43 i have made many many attempts and i have come up with a few nice pencils and brushes.
But i find its hard, with the current paint engine of tvpaint, to fully close the gap to truly natural feeling old media tools.
A lot can be achieved by using the animated cutbrush in clever ways, yet there are limitations to the number of parameters you can combine and so to what you can get out of it.


Here is a collection of some of mine and some from others hope you find something you can use...
Drawing Tools.tvpx

That's a great set of pencils. Thanks for posting those, Peter.

Peter Wassink wrote: ↑17 Nov 2023, 11:43 in the end i comfort myself with the notion that line quality is not the most important thing, well it shouldn't be anyway.

And of course that is true for many animated films. Custom brushes can help achieve a certain line quality, but sometimes it's just about how the artist puts down their line.

The "style" of the line quality is not always about a custom brush , but the skill of the artist who is doing the drawing. I recall asking Uli Meyer: "Hey, Uli, what custom brush parameters in TVPaint do you use?" on a project I worked on where Uli was the guy set the style for the animation. He said: "I just use the default pen brush tool." . Same on his "Molesworth" project (based on the style of Ronald Searle). He draws it that way by having spent time studying Searle's work. It's not the brush tool that makes it look that way, it's his skill .
https://vimeo.com/389277619

(that said, I would be happy to see TVPaint's brush creation engine brought up to the same level as a program like Clip Studio Paint, although I'm not unhappy with the quality of TVPaint's brushes overall. They do what I need them to do. Perhaps I do notice a difference if I jump into a program like Clip Studio Paint, but I'm fine with using the brushes in TVPaint. I think some of it may be that people get very accustomed to using a certain tool in Photoshop or Clip Studio Paint or ProCreate and then when that exact tool doesn't exist in a program like TVPaint it seems like a deficit.)


[Click image to see it larger. This was drawn in TVPaint with the default pen tool.]

I'm quite happy already with the recent brush engine. I spend quite some time in creating brushes, but I never had the feeling that I've "maxed out" it.

Peter Wassink wrote: ↑17 Nov 2023, 11:43 i have made many many attempts and i have come up with a few nice pencils and brushes.

I have used a number of your custom tools (including the latest set you uploaded).

I have a question about creating custom brushes in general: When you create a custom panel of brush tools are you creating the brushes with a certain project scale/resolution in mind that the brushes in the custom panel are optimized for ? What I mean is , in some cases I've noticed a brush seems to work great in a project resolution of 1080p , but if I create a project with 4K resolution the brush is way too thin, so I need to adjust the size ... I need to make a new custom panel with each of the brushes scaled up in size to look good at 4K resolution compared to HDTV (1080p) resolution. Do you create multiple versions of your Custom Brush Panels , scaled for 1080p , 2K , 4K. ?

I tend to create brushes much too large and have to scale them down later. But yes, different project dimensions require different brushes. In my case that's not so critical since I use different styles anyway, I scale between 20% and 250%, just how I need it. I use project-related custom panels a lot recently: for a recurring customer their official brush size and some brushes I need to mimick their existing background art (It's always too small), and the heads of their main characters in blue for quick roughs. For another I had created lots of FX brushes: water reflections and foliage.

Scaling is one of the major problems with tvpaint brushes.
if you scale the size of the brush it will change the balance of all the settings and it will often lead to a completely different looking line.

So yes, as soon as you have a very specific line you will need to rebuilt it for a different line thicknesses.

Here is an example of the limits of brush building

i just tried to whip up a custombrush that can produce a line that resembles what Uli Meyer did by hand in his Ronald Searle pieces.

Off course im not saying that a tool like this could replace his masterly craftmanship.
and as you can see i only manage to superficially come in the neighbourhood.

It mainly falls short in the sense that i could not find a way to give the user control to vary the overlap of the hatching,
thus making it very repetitive and mechanical and therefore uninteresting.

i made use of the animated brush which only has limited connection options, but had the the toolpanel contained a few more parameters to connect the playback of an animation to the wacom input i might have come much much closer to a usable line.
or even better, what if you could output two different animbrushes simultanoius, each with there own connection settings! this would really explode the possibilities...
for now we have to try and squeeze everything out of limited options that we have. (which is also fun...)

I tested the brush engine somewhat to the extreme with brushes containing 150 bitmaps, so I could build something which at least doesn't repeat too obviousy. But on my wishlist would be an option to 1. name bitmaps within a brush (or at least number them), then 2. have some way to shape conditional replay, like "play 11 bitmaps, then loop, if pressure increases play next 11 bitmaps (with overlap)", or "make 1-7, 8-15, 16-21, 22-30 loops, then play coomplete segments at random" or the like.