Limitations¶

This page list all the current limitations of PyTVPaint in its current state.

Windows only¶

As stated on the homepage, the tvpaint-rpc C++ plugin is currently compiled for Windows only.

We are interested in making it available for Linux and MacOS, but being a Windows Studio we have not needed nor had time to do so yet. If you want to contribute on this, please open an issue or a pull request on the plugin repository.

TVPaint 11.5+¶

TVPaint 11.5 is minimum supported version simply because we currently do not have an older version of TVPaint. The TVPaint SDK is what really limits the compatibility, but we suspect PyTVPaint is also compatible with TVPaint 11 since the SDK hasn't changed in a while. If you have a version of TVPaint prior to 11.5 and want to test the API, please let us know if it works and we will update the minimum requirements for the plugin and API.

Control characters in George results¶

This issue has been reported to TVPaint and is related to how the C++ SDK function TVSendCmd returns and encodes control character values.

If we use the George command tv_projectheadernotes for instance and the project notes text has some line breaks (\n), then the characters in the result buffer are not encoded properly.

For example:

In the project notes:

aa
bb
cc

The result from TVSendCmd:

['a', 'a', '\', 'n', 'b', 'b', '\', 'n', 'c', 'c' ]

This C++ code was used to print it:

char george_result[2048];
int executionStatus = TVSendCmd(iFilter, payload.command.c_str(), george_result);

std::stringstream ss;
ss << "[";

int i = 0;
while (george_result[i]) {
    ss << "'" << george_result[i] << "', ";
    i += 1;
}

ss << "]";

spdlog::info(ss.str());

So we suppose that control characters are not properly encoded.

Therefore, it is currently impossible to determine if it's actually a backslash \ followed by n or simply the line break character. SO PyTVPaint leaves these characters as is.

Info

The TVPaint dev team have been made aware of the issue, and we are hopeful that it will be fixed in the future.

George Official Documentation and Naming Convention Issues¶

Many functions in the official George documentation are poorly described or have the wrong description all together, many are overly complex and some don't work at all. Some functions also have misleading names, with some "layer" functions actually impacting the clip and not the layer for instance.

We tried to fix as many of these issues as we could when wrapping functions, putting the functions in the appropriate module when possible. We advise using our documentation for all wrapped functions instead of the official one as PyTVPaint's documentation is usually more accurate.

Misbehaving George functions¶

We will try to keep a list of the bugs/inconsistencies we encountered with any George commands, and describe the issues in the table below:

Method	Description
`tv_Ratio`	Always returns an empty string (`""`)
`tv_InstanceName`	Crashes if we provided with an invalid `layer_id`
`tv_CameraPath`	Confusing arguments and seemingly incorrect results (see this)
`tv_SoundClipReload`	Doesn't accept a proper clip id, only `0` seems to work for the current clip
`tv_LayerSelectInfo`	Does not select frames as stated in the documentation and will also return non selected frames if attribute `full` is set to True