See How TVPaint Animation 12 Can Change Your Artistic Workflow

TVPaint is back to tell us more about its 2D animation software. Its QA and lead animator Léo Fernandez shared the new features of TVPaint Animation that will make your work easier and more effective.

Introduction

I am Léo, the QA and lead animator of TVPaint Studio. I left school in 2011 and became a 2D animator. I’ve worked for Folimage, Netflix, Warner, Miyu Productions, and others. I’m a former sales representative at TVPaint, a trainer on the software since 2012, and a technical production supervisor and team leader on various animation projects.

I represent our team, composed of developers and salespeople. Since we last spoke, we’ve been working very hard on this big release – TVPaint Animation 12 and our new visual identity and website. A big change for us and our community!

TVPaint Animation

TVPaint Animation is our 2D bitmap animation software. It has been developed and commercialized by our company, TVPaint Développement, since 1997, and we are based in the North East of France. Our founder, Hervé Adam, imagined TVPaint Animation to bring traditional animation to screens, by implementing paper techniques into software. 

TVPaint provides the most natural numeric experience, just like drawing on paper. It regroups all the tools that a traditional animator needs. It is an efficient tool, used in many studios around the world and taught in many schools. It has gained the rank of industrial standard in the animation world over the years.

We’re famous for our brush engine, our Color and Texture Layer (CTG) that allows you to colorize faster, and our drawing experience that brings you closer to the paper experience. 

Our community always says that TVPaint is a very intuitive software and that it brings them the best experience when it comes to animating. Our community is very active (on our forum or social media), and they are very involved in helping us improve the software by sharing feedback or their professional and personal experience. 

Since our previous interview, we’ve focused on correcting all the bugs of TVPaint Animation 11, improving the quality experience for the animators. For example, we’ve improved the compatibility and performance on Mac ARM. Our main focus is to make TVPaint better for our users before taking any next step. 

For curious readers, here is the TVPaint Animation 11.7.3 changelog.

New Features in TVPaint Animation 12

You’re not ready for all the changes, it’s crazy! Layer Folders now organize your TVPaint 12 project by grouping your layers into Folders. A new 2D Camera is entirely redesigned around a key-based system, and you can easily change their positions from the Timeline.

Moreover, there are new transformation algorithms that guarantee better quality preservation for your drawings and an Image Library to manage project resources, which has been redesigned for the following feature.

We also introduce the new Bitmap Rigging engine to create puppets and manipulate characters using our Puppet Layers in TVPaint Animation 12 Professional. It also allows the animator to automatically generate in-betweens between two key poses to save even more time.

We always work close to our community to improve the software. Our team of beta testers provides feedback on every development of the software, ensuring we present a functioning solution to the public.
Our sales team visits studios and schools every year to also get their feedback and maintain a close professional relationship.

We also have at heart to meet the public during festivals and big animation events. Finally, we keep a close relationship with the TVPaint community via our social platforms (the forum, SoMe, website, etc.) We want TVPaint to answer the user’s needs.

With this new version, we want to offer a larger scale of work possibilities. TVPaint was known to be used in feature films, now we’re aiming the series workflows.

Let’s be honest, bitmap is amazing when you want to animate something that looks organic, but as with any technology, it has its limits. With our new tools, we want to overcome the previous limitations of TVPaint Animation. 

The newest release brings a lot of improvements, for example, our transformation tool. Let’s face it, it wasn’t the best until today. It has been a big subject of constant feedback over the years, and now we’ve come up with a nice solution: new algorithms that guarantee better quality preservation. This should be a game-changer for many bitmap animators.

We’ve implemented the Bitmap Rigging Animation system, which should help our user to aim the puppet animation through bone mechanics and automatic in-between. Thanks to the improvement of our Transformation algorithms and our Image Library, the puppet animation will not have any pixel alterations. Animators will be able to animate faster, as needed in the animation series industry.

We’ll always keep in mind that as a development company, our mission is to adapt to the needs of the industry, and today the main focus is productivity gain. 

We could finally implement the Modular Interface and the Layer Folders. These two options were the center of many requests for many years, but they also represented big changes in our code, which is why it took us some time to add (we hope they’ll forgive us for that!)

Then there is the 2D camera, which was not practical at all and not at all aligned with the industry standards. We needed to step up our game and we’re quite pleased with the result, we hope our community will feel the same. 

Roadmap

Regarding the upcoming news, first, we will be at Annecy in June, which is our biggest rendezvous of the year! It’s always an amazing moment for us because it’s a big hub for our community.

This year, we’ll have a big booth (A.13) with many talented guests and a lot of things to show to the festival-goers.

We will remain very committed to the student community, who are the next generation of animators, and we will maintain our advantages (they can benefit from a half-price discount on our licenses, up to 75% if they’re studying in a partner school). 

We’ve recently integrated the Pay in 4 program with Paypal to facilitate the purchase of TVPaint. 

And here's another important fact: our licenses are a one-time purchase and our tech support is included!

We have many ideas and projects for future versions of TVPaint Animation. We’ll keep improving the quality of life and user-friendliness, that’s a forever focus for us. 

As we said, and we can't emphasize it enough, we are always focused on the animator experience. We plan on improving our existing tools and pushing them further as much as possible. 

We have already planned a substantial life for V12 including numerous updates, and we hope to achieve between 1 and 2 releases per year.

If you want to learn TVPaint, check out my new tutorials on YouTube. We’ve completely rebranded our tutorial materials: videos, new documentation, etc. – all under the TVPaint Masterclass label. All our content will now be joined under this label, offering you the guarantee of verified and approved content, allowing animators to express all their artistic potential through mastering our animation tools. We plan on remaking all our former tutorials and adapting them to V12 and modern video standards.

Léo Fernandez, QA & Lead Animator at TVPaint Studio

Interview conducted by Theodore McKenzie