Yes, I’m playing with more animation software after a long hiatus. There’s this odd program called TVPaint that I’ve tried before, but never had enough patience to figure it out. I say it’s odd, because it’s made in France, was originally developed over 20 years ago for the Amiga(!) and has a unique interface that doesn’t use any OS X conventions at all. Tech support is in broken English, and if you buy the software, you have to wait for an archaic USB dongle to be shipped to you. But it’s been steadily growing in popularity among independent animators.

One reason I hated it before is that it didn’t really have dual-monitor support. But now that I’ve restricted myself to one monitor for drawing, I don’t have to worry about that. And, in spite of the loss of screen real estate, I’m finding it much more pleasant just to use it on one screen. Unlike Toon Boom’s Animate, which I paid big bucks for, its palettes are compactly arranged and are easy to quickly hide when you don’t need them.

Once I watched a few quick tutorials, I realized that, in many ways, the software was also more intuitive, especially in terms of quickly creating extremes and breakdowns and adjusting their exposure. Although I’ve only scratched the surface in terms of features, the fact that I can do basic animation without remembering a million keystrokes or struggling with the timeline is a positive sign.

Also positive is that the software is far more actively developed than Animate, which hasn’t had any sort of update in 2 years or so.

On the downside, there’s that dongle, and it doesn’t come cheap. And I’ll admit that it seems silly to buy yet another piece of animation software when I haven’t proven any actual animation aptitude.

I’ll sleep on it.