36 days of type 2023

Heyyy, it’s been a while

I participated in 2023 edition of 36 days of type. Only did 26 tho. It was quite fun. Check out my submissions at

As usual, all letters are animated in Synfig. Usually the latest dev version.

Most used layers are:
Shape layers like square and circle
Transforms
Stretch distortion
Duplicate
Free Time

I also used Exported Canvases a looooot

Most hitches I faced are:

  • A particular dialog showing up when i do somethings. Usually happens when i open up the .sif file. It shows ‘A waypoint exists at this particular point in time’

  • By the side of the timetrack panel, there is a new bar where you can change the interpolation of several waypoints at once. When I open Synfig sometimes, it is not there. And sometimes also when it is there, all of a sudden I do not see it again. :sneezing_face:. I have to restart the program
    Cont.d

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I cut the write up coz i thought it was too long😌

  • Rendering, especially with Duplicate took less time(even with a duplicate of a duplicate of a duplicate of a duplicate of a duplicate… It rendered in less than 15 min) . Thank you Synfig devs! :heart::fire:
    There is a problem tho. I like animating with a scaled down res (e.g. 480x270 instead of 1920x1080) and then scale it down when i want to render. But when resize was introduced and i tried using it rendered weirdly. It worked well for some but for others it split the video in half… Well i think a visual explanation will suffice. I will add that when i finish write up!

Improvements, I’d like in Synfig

  • Ability to run a plugin in an Exported Canvas
  • Easier renaming and reordering of Canvases
  • Sound Syncing Improvements. I just remembered that the latest dev versions of synfig don’t even display the sound waveform anymore​:persevere::sob:
  • Ability to edit sound using free time
  • Some basic sound effects : pitch adjustment, normalize, basic filters
  • Plugins that work similar to some effects and plugins in ae e.g flex, tilda(wave)
  • Some new 2.5D Distortion layers. Something like CC Sphere (not only Spheres but also other 3D shape)
  • Mesh gradients?
  • Bezier warp? I was thinking if we could add some parameters to the perspective layer. Like a boolean that switch tangents on and off
  • Bezier Interpolations with handles?
  • Replace certain colours?. Maybe adjust the new chroma key so that it has an input and and output color. We can still achieve a chroma key effect if we set output alpha to zero
  • Better Color Correction?. Maybe rework the Clamped layer?
  • More blend methods?

:sob::sob::persevere: Quite the list. I’d like to work on some of them though that is not possible now coz my laptop specs are pretty low. I am learning python and I want to try my hands with a few plugins especially now that plugins can have dialogs

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Anyone Interested in teaching me coz the dev docs are too confusing

Best strat for newbies usually is to get familiar with Computer Graphics (Computer Science level) concept. I myself lack in-depth knowledge in that area but like you I want to help improve the backend side too.

I guess self-taught route is probably the best option or taking up an online course about Computer Graphics (most popular ones I encountered deal heavily with 3D) would give you a general idea of how graphic drawing programs work and would also cover most of the hard but important topics too. Hard (but not impossible) route LOL.

Dev docs alone cannot cover most of the theoretical Computer Graphics stuff otherwise the site would become just another textbook :sweat_smile:

For sound-specific features (no idea :man_shrugging:) but GUI ones I think they’re manageable if one has already had basic exposure to GTKMM programming. That’s how I started contributing to Synfig GUI side.

Sorry for the long post. But I hope it sheds some light on your end.

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I read the dev docs to learn how to write a plugin not learn computer graphics

Most of your list items were CG related so… my answer steered in that wrong way. Completely ignorant of the fact that you were intending to do plugins. Forgive my ignorance LOL

Currently no one has contributed how to write a plugin to the dev doc site. Usually, the best option is to read the actual plugin code (Python) from the Synfig project files.

Or there are some uploaded in this forum by the communties (search feature would help).

Synfig uses xml. Maybe this portion of doc would also serve as a good reference guide for your new plugin

https://synfig-docs-dev.readthedocs.io/en/latest/common/sif_file_format.html

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Can i DM/disturb you a little? :sneezing_face::pray:

It’s completely ok to just ask embarrasing ques here. Just in case I don’t know the proper answer to help you then someone could always jump in to the rescue. With DM I might just be a bad link/server leading you to unknown error :sob::joy:

Moreover your posts here could end up helping other newer readers in the future :busts_in_silhouette::busts_in_silhouette::busts_in_silhouette:

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I was going through some plugins .py file in an IDE and i discovered that there were some modules that were used that are synfig specific. Can I get a list of python modules and what they do

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There are no Synfig specific modules, whichever plugins you were inspecting, the developers of the plugin might have created them and most likely are user-defined modules.

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Sorry for the delay. Technical Issues.
So what modules do i need to import to:

  • Edit Canvas Metadata
  • Edit paths

I learned that synfig has implemented a simple dialog. How do I create it?