Connect Parameters to imported data

General Animation discussion
1

Hi all,

I just discovered Synfig and getting dragged into it more and more each day - what a great program!
Alas, there are two questions I coulndn’t find an answer for in the wiki/tutorials (there are somehow related):

1.) Is it possible to move objects (resp. change parameters) according to externally calculated values?

As an example take the bouncing ball and imaging you want to move it according to positions you have calculated before (i.e. you have an array of all y-values for each frame, e.g. by doing a physical simulation). Is there a way to import that values and let any parameter have that values for the respective frame? Would be great for animation of scientific data.

2.) Is there a way to List Import BLines, i.e. to create a stack of vector images and have them imported so that Synfig identifies the vertices from frame to frame?
Example: In the Walk-Demo, merely the images are imported which makes tweening hard (there are essentially blured over) and the shapes are drawn over within Synfig to vectorize them. I want that to be automated. Is there a way to do that?
(e.g. right now I do lipsyncing by analysing the wavefile within python, draw vector images of mouth positions with PyCairo and assemble an output.lst - essentially what papagayo does, but without vowels, however as well without the need to create the mouth images for each pose by hand. It would be nice to import the beziers directly and have Synfig tweening them automaticly)

Thanks for any answers

B

2

Hi!

  1. It is an old request I think that there is a thread on that. Not implemented but a great and intersting feature to implement.
  2. Not implemented and might be difficult to implement. But not impossible.
    -G
3

Hi.
All are possible to be done with a python script for synfig 0.64 ( not released yet ). The main problem with the python scripts for synfig is that you just get the filename to work with. But synfig’s file is an xml file so you can manipulate it with pythons elenttree for example. To solve the problem of what to change I used a special tag in the desc of the layer or def param. Also keep in mind that synfig is compartible with cairo . What I mean is that you can transform your values of you drawing to much the view-box of the project.
You will love synfig’s file format. Trust me. Also .sifz is just compressed .sif and .sif is just an xml.

4

Yeah, that sounds great - I just opened a .sifz for the first time and it’s really just an easy to understand xml.
I might even just edit it by hand/script - basically it comes down to include some tags int the tag for each bline point you want to manipulate (I ignored the “guid” and it still works). Great.

Thanks.