Hello, everyone! My weekly report is slightly delayed again, but it’s finally here.
Lots of things happened last week. First of all, Ivan have finally fixed the Windows build, which was broken for almost one month. That allowed me to publish the latest development snapshots for all platforms. Now everyone can test all the latest features landed into Synfig for the past months.
Then Ivan continued the optimization work by implementing some optimizations for Image Layer. He also tried to get rid of Tile rendering, but that turned to be a bit more tricky than we expected.
Also, he have made some steps to finalize the Bone Multilink feature. If you watched my last demonstration video, you probably noticed that it is impossible to move the shape points that are influenced by more than one bone (the points are marked with gray color).
Ivan have fixed this by implementing the reverse manipulations for WeightedAverage convert type. Unfortunately, we can’t to merge this feature into master branch, because there are still some problems with file loading/saving remain there. We hope to get them fixed soon.
Finally, the news about our fundraising campaign.
The campaign is coming to the end, but the good news that it’s already reached its goal! That means Ivan will keep working on Synfig in April.
Many thanks to everyone who supported us and made that happen!
I would like to take a chance and put a special recognition for Gerald Young, who have funded one-third of every campaign for 4 months in a row. Thank you!
The “Choose Priority” reward was claimed by Rylander Animation studio - and this time we’ve got a request to implement a special development priority and after some short discussion the agreement was made for…
BONE-DRIVEN IMAGE DISTORTION!
You can find the similar feature in Anime Studio (see this tutorial, paragraph 1) or ToonBoom Harmony Stage (see this page) - it allows to deform a bitmap image using a skeleton layer.
As usual, the main challenge will be not the distortion implementation itself, but achieving the good speed. Let’s see how it will turn out. Stay tuned!