Welcome to TVPaint Community forums !

Hi there! Is it possible to create something to export an animation as a single file PNG strip with alpha channels?

I'm baffled as to how or if tvpaint could do this. I'm creating artwork and animations for a video game, and this is a feature I would seriously need for TVPaint for any game character animations, etc.

Would anyone familiar with TVPaint's scripting language be able to write such a script? Or is it impossible because of the canvas size that must be set at the start of the application?

Hi Ace, welcome on the TVPaint forum.

TVPaint can export PNG sequences with alpha chanel.

Could please tell us more about the Strip export ? or just give an exemple ? I'm not sure to understand the concept correctly.

Ace wrote:Hi there! Is it possible to create something to export an animation as a single file PNG strip with alpha channels?

By strip, do you mean a single image that holds it's animated frames in a row, like CSS multi-state rollover images?

I'd do this in Photoshop. If you really depend on TVP to do this, it's just a bit complicated:

You'll need one project with the width of (character width) x (number of frames). Get your character as an AnimBrush and use the Keyframer to distribute the frames. Duplicate this animLayer as often as you have frames. Shift them so you have one frame with all drawinggs visible. Export this.

I tried to automate this with whatever panel I had installed, but no luck. There should be a script which copies all frames of one layer into one frame.

A script that can tile an anim brush on the screen is in the Creation Pack.

@Fabrice
What do you mean that it tiles the anim brush? Does this automatically create a new project with the correct size and distributes the images, or does it do it only in the current frame after the creation of an anim brush? How does that brush you're referring to work exactly?

Also, I'm not too familiar with how to create/use anim brushes across multiple frames.

@malcoonig
And yeah, making the frames on a single image is what I'm after.

the animbrush contains several brushes, taken/cropped from some selected images of an animlayer.
the script asks for a grid size and put one element of the animbrush just after the other on that grid, then go to the next line.