Welcome to TVPaint Community forums !

Hello, I have been using TVPaint since the last year now, and it has become my favourite tool for animation and even illustrations.

I wanted to share a few things that I would like to see/ have in it.

1. A singular box asking for the FILE NAME and LOCATION before the export settings would be amazing and more efficient. I export multiple clips individually and changing the file name from the current box seems a little inefficient.

2. Extended Canvas, one thing that I really find cool in Toon Boom is that they have this Illustrator style canvas where you can draw beyond the Artboard/ frame. This would be really awesome if we can have it here, very helpful in pre-production stages. It could also be a DRAWING PLANE GUIDELINE where we can draw on and move around, rather than having an infinite board. This could reduce the taxation on hardware as well.

3. Storyboard Publish Feature - It would be great if the pdf options would have a cleaner minimal option too like the 4 panel Japanese storyboard template. I just feel it’s redundant to have the feature but not be able to use it.

4. Image Library - Since v12, I have been able to drag and drop images directly into the library which is really helpful, however it seems to only work once, and then the images are imported as frames.

5. Just having recently learned about the SHARP/ smooth PEN tool feature, could be added somewhere in the manual for others to know as well.

6. A small tutorial on the Multiplane Camera would be great too.

7. The three dots for rearranging the timeline seems to cover a whole lot more space. Can we have the option to disable, or perhaps it disappears/ appears upon locking/ unlocking the panel?

8. Loading video as references, not having it on the project. The preloading seems to make the computer a little slow.

9. The Audio scrubbing seems to be offset or laggy on may of my audio clips, have tried it with different formats as well.

10. Lastly a roadmap for upcoming updates and features would be really really awesome. We can even do a voting poll on certain features which could take priority based on the votes.

I love TVPaint and what it offers, this is by no means a list of complaints. I use it daily as my main tool and software and want to see it get better. I apologise if anything I asked for is already there in TVPaint.

Hello Nagarjuna!

Thanks for the feedback!

Nagarjuna Gupta wrote: ↑03 Apr 2025, 17:401. A singular box asking for the FILE NAME and LOCATION before the export settings would be amazing and more efficient. I export multiple clips individually and changing the file name from the current box seems a little inefficient.

I agree that the current export window has a lot of information on it, and it could definitely be made easier to understand and to edit, but I don't think that having a pop-up for the filename and location before you can choose the other export setting would be a good thing.

Nagarjuna Gupta wrote: ↑03 Apr 2025, 17:402. Extended Canvas, one thing that I really find cool in Toon Boom is that they have this Illustrator style canvas where you can draw beyond the Artboard/ frame. This would be really awesome if we can have it here, very helpful in pre-production stages. It could also be a DRAWING PLANE GUIDELINE where we can draw on and move around, rather than having an infinite board. This could reduce the taxation on hardware as well.

Complex to do.
It's easier to do for vector-based software as you "just" have to keep the vector parameters in memory, but in bitmap you have to remember all pixels, so that would eat up a lot of memory.
The Image Guideline however can be moved outside the drawing area and keep its data:

Nagarjuna Gupta wrote: ↑03 Apr 2025, 17:403. Storyboard Publish Feature - It would be great if the pdf options would have a cleaner minimal option too like the 4 panel Japanese storyboard template. I just feel it’s redundant to have the feature but not be able to use it.

We do plan on revamping the Storyboard as a whole during v12's lifecycle, we'll keep that in mind!

Nagarjuna Gupta wrote: ↑03 Apr 2025, 17:404. Image Library - Since v12, I have been able to drag and drop images directly into the library which is really helpful, however it seems to only work once, and then the images are imported as frames.

You shouldn't be able to drag and drop images to the Library so that's weird that you were able to.
To clarify: we'd love to be able to do more with drag and dropping in the software, but other things have to be revamped first.

Nagarjuna Gupta wrote: ↑03 Apr 2025, 17:405. Just having recently learned about the SHARP/ smooth PEN tool feature, could be added somewhere in the manual for others to know as well.

I believe it's already in the manual for both v11 ( https://doc-tvp11.tvpaint.com/index.php ... ooth-sharp ) and v12 ( https://doc.tvpaint.com/docs/drawing-ba ... heat-sheet ).

Nagarjuna Gupta wrote: ↑03 Apr 2025, 17:406. A small tutorial on the Multiplane Camera would be great too.

We do have an older tutorial for that! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyyZfcw197M
To be honest, the Multiplane Camera is such a complex FX that a "small" tutorial is almost impossible to do as there's so much ground to cover :p

Nagarjuna Gupta wrote: ↑03 Apr 2025, 17:407. The three dots for rearranging the timeline seems to cover a whole lot more space. Can we have the option to disable, or perhaps it disappears/ appears upon locking/ unlocking the panel?

Which v12 version are you using?
The dots were indeed taking too much space in the initial release version, but in 12.0.3 we've greatly reduced the size they take.

Nagarjuna Gupta wrote: ↑03 Apr 2025, 17:408. Loading video as references, not having it on the project. The preloading seems to make the computer a little slow.

Not sure I understand?

Nagarjuna Gupta wrote: ↑03 Apr 2025, 17:409. The Audio scrubbing seems to be offset or laggy on may of my audio clips, have tried it with different formats as well.

Are you on Windows or macOS? There used to be a few issues on macOS in the initial 12.0.0 version but I believe they were fixed later on.

Nagarjuna Gupta wrote: ↑03 Apr 2025, 17:4010. Lastly a roadmap for upcoming updates and features would be really really awesome. We can even do a voting poll on certain features which could take priority based on the votes.

Both of these will likely never happen.
Having our roadmap in the open would let other "rival" software know what we plan on doing and they could/would act accordingly.
Also, about polls, even very small companies don't do that. We decide what to add on the software, based on the feedback we receive, not based on polls.

Nagarjuna Gupta wrote: ↑03 Apr 2025, 17:40 6. A small tutorial on the Multiplane Camera would be great too.

This one is good -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2W3sji6ZTDA




.

Thierry wrote: ↑04 Apr 2025, 09:54

Nagarjuna Gupta wrote: ↑03 Apr 2025, 17:408. Loading video as references, not having it on the project. The preloading seems to make the computer a little slow.

Not sure I understand?

I believe it is the same issue I reported here: https://forum.tvpaint.com/viewtopic.php?t=16776

When unchecking the "PreLoad" box , TVPaint is only referencing the source video file, but is not completely importing/loading the full video file into the .tvpp project.
so TVPaint is reading the video file on the fly, as a referenced file. (especially with large video files)

Unchecking PreLoad helps the video files load up in TVPaint much faster , which is good, BUT then the playback in TVPaint suffers , to the point where TVPaint lags so much it becomes unusable.

It would be a huge improvement if TVPaint could utilize source video files as referenced files that are not fully loaded similar to how After Effects or DaVinci Resolve can use video source files as referenced files , which keeps the overall working file size smaller for the AE or DR project, only fully rendering the source video files when the AE (or Davinci) project is rendered to a composite video file. Otherwise the choice for now in TVPaint is to leave the PreLoad box checked and to fully import the source video file(s) into TVPaint ... which results in better playback (if Display preview settings are lowered to 40% - 50% preview quality), however this has the disadvantage of causing the TVPaint file to expand GBs larger than if the source video files were not preloaded.

Hello David, your concerns about preloading have been noted on my end back in early March and I plan to discuss this with the team when some ongoing works are in a more advanced state.

Nagarjuna Gupta wrote: ↑03 Apr 2025, 17:40 2. Extended Canvas, one thing that I really find cool in Toon Boom is that they have this Illustrator style canvas where you can draw beyond the Artboard/ frame. This would be really awesome if we can have it here, very helpful in pre-production stages. It could also be a DRAWING PLANE GUIDELINE where we can draw on and move around, rather than having an infinite board. This could reduce the taxation on hardware as well.

As Thierry mentioned, this is easier to manage in vector programs such as Harmony so I don't think we will see this in the current TVPaint engine , but hopefully in a future version. (although raster programs like Photoshop and others allow for drawing information that is outside of the main work canvas to be retained, so if you shift a layer up or down or side to side , the pixels that were drawn on that layer are not lost , but can still be seen if the layers are shifted again. As it is now, TVPaint crops and deletes information on anything moved outside the main canvas area, so if you move it back in to the main canvas area the image is cut-off. I would be very happy if TVPaint could at least have this function, as in Photoshop).

The workaround that some of us use is to start a NewProject using the Project with Camera and make it 200% - 500% larger than the intended output area , so for example if your intended output is 2048 x 1152 , you could make the project 300% larger (6144 x 3456) , so when the new project is generated you have a sizable border area outside of the camera view, which is where you will draw your animation. If you don't need that much border area make the project only 200% or 150% .
All animation is drawn within the 2048 x 1152 window (camera view), but you have the rest of the canvas to use
for drawing, notes, reference images.

Of course this also makes it easy to do extended camera moves, because you can
draw out your images to extend beyond the border of the 2048 x 1152 camera view and then allow the camera to roam freely
across this extended canvas. In the end you are outputting to a video file that is sized at 2048 x 1152 or 1920 x 1080 .
The disadvantage is this oversized canvas will make the file size larger. (not much of a problem if your computer is fast and you have plenty of RAM)

Thank you Thierry for helping me out with these. Also it's funny that I am able to drag images directly into the image library, I thought it's a new feature that is introduced. Excited for the Storyboard and upcoming updates on V12. Thank you Daniel for providing the tutorials on the matter.