Hello people! My name is Todor Imreorov and am studying 3d animation at Bradford uni. I’ve worked on a couple of different flash projects in the past, one being an online learning platform called scoyo.com
The reason I am interested in synfig is dead simple- line tracing! I found it to be really confusing for animation, but very valuable to have just because of its pen tool and the ability to edit the weight of a line by the node (and not the whole line). That enables the artist to ink an image with mouse clicks and still look as if inked by hand (line weight varies!) The only other tool that does that easily is called paint tool sai and is shareware on windows.
Standard vector software does not have that feature. Line weight is not stored in nodes in general vector graphics (so the only way to have interesting lines is by making them fills) . If someone forked synfig to do only coloring and tracing, and added the ability to even export as svg, that would make it one of the most useful tools for cartooninsts and people who generally do comic strips. And especially on linux!! Gimp can not do it, Krita can not do it. Heck there is not one single alternative on linux with that feature. The only problem for me on synfig is that it cant export an individual frame and set the canvas size without fiddling around with lots of options
Hi blurymind, Synfig can do coloring and tracing, Fills are called ‘Regions’ and Outlines are called ‘BLines’ but i admit is tricky to trace complex draws, Synfig can import SVG but not (yet?) export them, still i read around some time back that .sif files can be reverted to SVG, but i’m not sure at all, what you want is possible, and is not as difficult as it first look, but maybe you’ll have to expend a little more testing Synfig, since is very different from other kind of Animation software
same here I wanna save my synfig animations as svg files that way I can put them in a web browser and further animate them with javascript and turn them into animated links etc.
to do all the animation in javascript alone is possible but synfig provides a great graphical interface that would totally cut out the need for a lot of the javascript I would be coding.
I found a link to a script that supposedly does this but the script is no longer online
and i am not sure if the file that is exported will be an animated svg or not.
instead of all these animated gifs think of the possibilities of an animated svg file playing directly in a web browser and not having to manually code it all into the svg or javascript.