[All issues linked] Fan-made Spy vs Spy episode: "Bait"

Artwork Finished works
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Hey everyone!

Remember this: [WIP] Spy vs Spy
After only 4 years I present to you the first finished episode:

What do you think? Be harsh.

Can I complain now? I will complain now.
Oh, it took a lot of work. Everything aside, the most important issue to me is that I don’t know how to work with outlines. You see, it requires A TON of masking. Each character has 8 fingers with 2 joints on each one so 16 overlapping outlines should be masked on each frame in the worst case scenario. And it’s just the bloody fingers, there’s also everything else.

So it requires creating small “Alpha Over” regions for each joint, adjusting it on each frame. It’s so goddamn tedious that I just gave up. Instead, I just put a fat “Shade” layer with opacity 5 above everything and it does not look good.

I wanted to keep everything animation-related in Synfig but it seems it’s not a very good option. In my next animation (very short Sonic the Hedgehog parody) I’m gonna try a different approach: I will render all outlines as a separate set of pngs using the power of a new “Chroma key” layer and then correct those outlines in Pencil2D using my tablet and see how this scheme works.

All right! Now I am gonna make some drafts for bugs I discovered working on the animation and also some features I want to have. Later I’ll make them into proper issues on Github, this is just for me, so I won’t forget.

Bugs:

  1. Synfig can go to the keyframes that are located past “Start time”.
    Issue: "jump-[prev|next]-keyframe" action can jump past project's time range · Issue #3423 · synfig/synfig · GitHub
2. Synfig still hangs when you right-click on a waypoint. Just in a specific case I haven't quite caught yet. It was on me, messed something up with my patches. Not relevant anymore.

  1. Manipulation of “Radial composite” (tangent) waypoints in “Graphs” panel should be allowed because it’s a default type.
    Issue: Allow manipulation of tangent waypoints in Graphs panel · Issue #3426 · synfig/synfig · GitHub

  2. “Perspective” layer eats WAY too much RAM. I think the problem is with “Clip” option, but I am not sure yet.
    Issue: Perspective layer eats WAY too much RAM in certain cases · Issue #3430 · synfig/synfig · GitHub

Features:

  1. Add option to mark all choices in “Pasting Layers” dialogue.
    Issue: Mark/Unmark all option in the "Pasting layers" dialog · Issue #3413 · synfig/synfig · GitHub

  2. Ability to set default interpolation and lock future/past keyframes.
    Issue: Add option to set up default interpolation · Issue #3433 · synfig/synfig · GitHub

hqdefault

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Amazing! Those 3d effects must have taken a lot of time to complete!

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They certainly did! But I have a 3D cube template that helps with it. Hopefully I will share it one day. Just as soon as I fully figure out my animation workflow so it doesn’t take me a year for a short cartoon.

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Btw does anyone feel if Synfig file format were split in multiple xml files, for example, like the Enve’s file format, a lot of Synfig’s problems could be solved ( maybe like copy and pasting exported canvas, bones, etc)? @rodolforg @Svarov @BobSynfig :eyes: Just asking.

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You’re committing a crime of being off-topic, good sir. Next time please make a separate one or BobSynfig will kill you.

I am not a developer, but I don’t think anything would be solved by separating stuff into multiple files. It will only add fuss to the development since you will have to look for stuff in different files complicating the loading algorithm and perhaps even slowing down the loading time further. Not to mention the plugin system will become even harder to use because of that.

Remember that everything works, except for those blasted bones, so the problem isn’t really in the storing project, it is with clunky implementation of the bones system. Maybe we can do something crazy like separating all the bone structures in the different file so when they break we can just remove them and save the rest of the project but it isn’t a proper solution.

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I’m getting old, I’m not doing such things anymore myself.
I will hire a hitman.
:wink:

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All issues in the original post now have corresponding links to Github and some already have merge requests! Thank you all for improving Synfig, especially that one guy, you know who you are :wink:

I think I will make this a habit, whenever I finish my next animation I will make a small report on the issues I discovered and features I am missing and if something gets fixed, good. I will keep quiet for a while.

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