TVPaint vs Flash

First proper blog entry!  OH YES.

One of the main animation tools I've started to use recently is the piece of software called TVPaint, so I thought I'd just write a little about how I've found using it, especially for character animation.

Firstly, it's rather similar to Flash in the way that it works on a frame-by-frame basis, but there are a few big differences.  The interface looks a lot more complicated on first glance, and there are a LOT more buttons to get the hang of.  I can only really compare the look of the interface to something like the oldschool MS Paint. 

The actual program is heaven to animate in though.  There are a load of things you can do in this software that just make it so much easier and more enjoyable to animate in than Flash.  For instance, you can turn and rotate your entire workspace just like you could a piece of paper.  This means when you have to draw a line at an awkward angle, you can just flip the 'paper' round a bit and it'll be easy peasy.

Another thing that's very useful in TVPaint is the way that you can tailor your lightbox/onionskinning to show only the frames you want it to.  You can alter the opacity and colour of the frames that appear, and this can be really useful, as in Flash I've often found that the strength of the onionskin can sometimes block your view of the current frame you're drawing on.

Flash does have some advantages though.  Flash is vector based while TVPaint animates using rasterised images.  This means that you can resize frames in Flash and have the lines stay clean and sharp.  Whereas in TVPaint, if you move the image around too much, the lines get softer looking and blurred.

I've only been using TVPaint for a little while now, but I've already found the difference to be huge, and it's really useful to be able to animate parts in Flash, then import them into TVPaint for colouring and so on.

Just to round up, here's an animation found on Youtube that was created in TVPaint.  It was partly this video that made me want to trial this software in the first place.  Enjoy.

First post!

Oi oi!  So.  This is a blog.  On this page I'll be posting images and videos which both inspire and are relevant to my own work, as well as anything else interesting that catches my eye.  As an almost-graduate animator, most of my posts will be animation, cartoon or moving image related.

And that's it for now!  Check back soon for some updates!