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Hello,

I have animated a small smoke effect and now I wanted to apply a blur to the animation.
What I would like to achieve is to have no blur at the bottom and a lot of blur at the top (see picture below).
I have tried all the blur effects in TVPaint but could not find a way to do this.
I don't even know how to achieve this by hand, because if I set a brush to "smooth" there is a certain point where it does not get any more blurry.
Does anyone know if there is a way to achieve this?

Hmm, I would do this :
• duplicate structure
• FX stack : image source = layer with smoke animation
• brush spreading (using a watercolor or crayon brush) + check "result only" box + spreading zone as a V, so it would not affect the bottom.

Very interesting! I have not used this effect before.

Elodie wrote:spreading zone as a V, so it would not affect the bottom

I don't quite understand this part. I made a V shape but the bottom part is still affected.

You can also make a filled shape on another layer above the layer to be affected with an opacity gradient (white on top, black on the bottom), then set the layer as a stencil. Hide visibility.
Apply the FX Stack blur to the image layer (not the stencil layer) and the FX element will be screened through the stencil. With this method you can apply FX to selective regions of the image.
You may want the opacity to have some organic noise beyond a simple linear gradient, in which case you could just make a black and white painted opacity map on top of the image to be affected, setting the opacity map layer to stencil.
This technique works fine with Gaussian Blur, Brush Spreading, or any other FX. '

Nice result Paul !

The "V" is nearly good, but shall not be like this (sorry, I'm on the bus right now and since I've got a Blackberry, I can't use TVPaint :p)

As you see, you have the V and you have a kind of "pacman / camember / pie" HUD under the V.
This pacman shape is the spread, so right now you are spreading the brush everywhere but the top.
It must be reduced and look like a slice and be turned upside down.

Hopefully it's clear :s

meslin wrote:You can also make a filled shape on top of the layer to be affected with an opacity gradient...

This is what I was looking for, thank you! I did not know that stencils can be combined with FX
(click on it to see the gif). Now it would be interesting to combine it with brush spreading.

Elodie wrote:It must be reduced and look like a slice and be turned upside down.

I made it to a slice but then almost all the brushes disappear
I must be doing something wrong. I tried to use meslin's method and brush spreading on this test here (click on it to see the gif): Very interesting. Depending on the brush I can have various results.

Furushil, you seem to have it under control! I didn't know for sure that the stencil solution would work until I tried it. I posted the .tvpp project above.
For the "too-few brush stamps" problem, decrease the dispersion. Warning: if you get down to 2 or 1, you may crash TVP. That happens pretty reliably when i use this FX on a large (1080p x 200% for camera) project. But dispersion=3 seems to be pretty safe and will increase your brush stamp density a lot.

Nice result

Very interesting. Depending on the brush I can have various results.

Not only the brush, but the parameters too. Too bad it's not in the manual yet. I will give you deeper explanations on next week

yep, sorry, I will try to finish that part of the manual, as planed.

I've recorded a short video with Quicktime. It's soundless, but I think images will speak for themselves

http://www.tvpaint.com/dl/forums/BrushSpreading.mov" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Elodie wrote:I've recorded a short video with Quicktime.

Thank you for the video, it makes things more clear. I have to try the effect out on something else in the future.

you're welcome

Morning all, I'm trying to find something in-depth about the brush spreading effect to work out if it'll be suitable for a project I'l planning out. I can't find any documentation about it that goes through everything. I'm trying to play with it but I'm getting the pin wheel, so I imagine one of my settings is unreasonable

The doc is in progress

However, maybe you can send a screenshot and show the way you're working.