TVP Animation 9 Pro

the dashboard of TVP Animation 9 Pro

TVP Animation is not for the weak of heart. This software packages encompasses almost every tool you could imagine needing to create fantastic animations. The downside is, it encompasses almost every tool you could imagine needing to create fantastic animations. The learning curve on this one is somewhat steep, but once you get the hang of it, the versatility redeems the product and opens your imagination to hundreds of techniques to use for your next animation. This is not a beginner’s program and documentation on it takes some hunting (great tutorials on this one can be found here or here) but I feel the creators of TVP Animation 9 Pro  wanted to cover all the possibilities when it come to an animator’s needs for versatility.

using the blue pencil tool to rough in images

One of the best key features I found with TVP is the ability to use a blue pencil to sketch in your work, then drawing on top of that with a black pencil and with one command, erase all the blue pencil rough marks you made to clean up your images. In addition to this great still image tool, TVP offers light box mode, allowing you to view your series of images in an onion skin fashion with great control over opacity and color of the skinned images. To list all the tools of this complete animating software program would take a booklet, which may leave some frustrated, however since the earliest concept of this program in 1991 (with the release of TVPaint!), this French software package continues to polish it’s product. This is by far one of the best animating software programs I’ve seen to date.  If you go to their website you can download a trial copy of TVP but be prepared to dedicate a little time to learning it’s features.