Ducks

Hello.

I’m starting with Synfig Studio, and have some issues with the ducks.

  1. I see no central duck in the square that allows me to move it without having to select all ducks. The circle, polygon and bline have it.

  2. The central duck in the polygon and bline is not much central to the figure. I would position it at the centroid or at the center of the figure’s enclosing rectangle. Currently they seem to reside at the centre of the image. That means that they will easyly overlap and can be offscreen if you are zooming elsewhere in the image.

  3. I really have a hard time in using the bline tool to draw closed polygons! I wish I could just doubleclick near the starting point, or press Enter. But I just keep getting the “split tangents” options! It also seems impossible to move a vertex without turning it into a curve.

Can someone offer some advice?
I am glad to have such a fine free (GPL) animation tool.

Yes that’s the way it is constructed. There is not Origin in the Rectangle Layer. Alternatively if you use a recent SVN version you can draw outlines and regions with the rectangle tool that produces Outline and Region layers.

Yes, it is by default a the center of the canvas (0.0,0.0). If you want a Origin duck that lies at the geometric average center of the figure when first time drawn, you should draw it around center of the canvas and move the Origin to the desired position. Anyway, if your suggestion were implemented you can end with the origin placed outside the zoom or the canvas if you move (animate) the figure ducks normally. Also have the origin ducks in the same default position allows you to easily link it between different kind of layer what could be so difficult if you place it at the geometric average center.

If you want a sharp corner shape using bline tool you can hide the tangents ducks meanwhile you use the tool (ATL-3). It would avoid the problem of drag the tangents and make easy loop the bline.

synfig.org/Keyboard_Shortcuts

-G

Well, I have no idea of what you are talking about, but I’m sure it will be very useful. I’m glad it wasn’t an overlook.

I’m somewhat used to vector drawing software, and that doesn’t seem very intuitive to me. But I realize that this is another kind of program, and has to deal with other kind of restrictions and problems. Almost all of them I haven’t realized yet.

For what you’re saying, composing an image would involve drawing each part and moving them one by one to the correct location of the canvas. So I imagine that having this Origin duck at the center of the polygon isn’t such an useful thing to have. Is there a better way to move a figure?

Doesn’t that happen also if I move the figure half-screen to one side?

Now you’ve lost me!
I thought that it was something that a programmer forgot to fix, but if you say that for some reason it is better that way, I believe you. Maybe with some practice I can understand why.

Yes, that is better.

I would also like to see a keyboard shortcut to end a bline (like Enter to stop, Space to close it first)? When doing several of them, I need to loose focus and move the mouse pointer to the tools menu and reselect the tool. Alt-b seems to work fine, but I need to look at the keyboard to press it.

Thanks.

well this is old, but I was confused by the same at the beginning and still I do not understand why it has to be this way, as for circles the origin is in the middle… so is seems to be inconsistent to me.

We should at least have to explain why and how to find the origin and how to work with it in the doc.