Frame by frame animation template

[Lae82]

This is a template for those who want to animate frame by frame in Synfig.
Click on the fbf switch layer to see the keyframes (cels 0-16) in the timeline.

Before drawing on frame 0 select the “000” layer set under “Sets”>“cel_nr” to activate that layer and making your lineart be put into layer “0”. Draw the lines on frame 0.

Activate onion skin.
Go to next frame (frame 1) select “001” layer set to activate layer “1” and draw. Go to next frame (frame 2) select “002” layer set to activate layer “2” and draw.
And so on…

If you deselect all drawings you will draw outside the frame folder when you draw again. So always select the layer set first before drawing.

Tips:
Don’t be in animating mode while drawing (Red figure). Use editing mode (Green figure).

Use “Stop current operation” (red icon upper right) to enable playback of the frames after drawing.

Assign custom keyboard shortcut key (example: < and shift + >) to move between frames.

When you have some lineart objects you can add them to a set called “lineart” and if you color you can add to set called “color”. This will help you selecting and editing all the lines and fills after drawing (handle edit, stroke width, color change etc).

Don’t use preview > “Render future and past frames active” while drawing and turn of grid snapping.

You can add more cel frames and frame sets than the 17 frames in the template.

Frame counter in the upper left corner shows the current frame. Active switch frame layer is also highlighted bold in the layers panel.

Layer sets were named “000, 001, 002 etc” since "1,2,3,10,11,12 etc didn’t order correctly in the sets list. But 000 means layer 0, 001 means layer 1 and so on.

Templates Synfig 1.5.3:
fbf template synfig ball2.sifz (29.8 KB)
fbf template synfig blank.sifz (5.7 KB)

With Layout helper and project margins:
fbf synfig with layout helper.zip (9.0 KB)

[Lae82]

Adding a face to the ball
Adding lines is easy. Adding more color fills is little trickier but you can select the current frame set/layer first > select the top region layer in layer panel and draw. This creates the fill under the lineart and above last created region. You can also use group layers with fills and add group to sets. Try to find a workflow that suits you.

fbf template synfig ball3.sifz (61.0 KB)

[Lae82]

When using outside margins together with 1920x1080 resolution you can create a new synfig project for render at 1920x1080 and import the cel animation project and the extra outside margins will be cut out/hidden.

[Lae82]

Increasing/decreasing framerate for fbf animation on timeline.
We can increase or decrease framerate with the Freetime layer effect. In the example file put the Freetime keys closer to eachother for faster fbf animation and move them apart for slower fbf animation. In this example two keyframes are set for the “time” parameter. Key frames are created at frame 0 with value “0” and at frame 12 with value “12”. The keys can then be moved closer together on the timeline to increase speed or dragged further apart to slow down speed.

To avoid having frames cut out on very fast animation (very close Freetime keyframes) increase the projects frame rate to 24 or higher.

fbf framerate with freetime.sifz (29.7 KB)

[Lae82]

I saw “Lock selection” was enable on the “fbf” layer in the templates. Deactivate “Lock selection” and you can select and edit nodes by clicking a line for example.