Hi!
Short animated New Years Card I made in Synfig. It started as a silly drawing and then I decided to give it some motion with Synfig.
The character was made on an old Ipad with Adobe Ideas. Exported as pdf and imported to Inkscape. The pdf had to many vertex for synfig to handle so I exported it as png with separated body parts that I gave some motion with the Group Transformation Widget. (To many crashes and performance issues with the skeleton deformation tool) The animation of the character was exported as png and reimported in a switch file. The snow was made with Genetes particles template and for speed reasons rendered separately as png and then reimported in 2 switch layers (one as overlay and another in the BG) in Synfig. Fire works come from Svarovs template and also rendered separate as png and imported back in a switch file. The result was rendered to gif. It’s funny that a vector animation program like Synfig handles 400 png images better and faster than vectors.
Nice work, man!
If I understand correctly, in your resulting file, where you were doing all the compositing, you had a huge amount of pngs previously exported from other scenes, so you literally put it all together using frame-by-frame technique (switch layer, constant interpolation). Is that right? If so, how much time such compositing took? I guess it should take a lot of time if there’re around 400 pngs…
I was thinking of using something similar in my tests. Make a simple vector animation, then export it to png, then paint over it (add textures) in a raster editor, let’s say, MyPaint. After that, import it back to Synfig and do frame-by-frame. I just wonder how much time it would take.
Yes, that’s correct. It’s tedious but it does not take that long. You can import a whole bunch of png’s at once by dragging them onto the canvas and then you have to put the waypoints and change the names in the switch layer manually: jump two frames ahead and change the switch layer, jump two frames ahead and change the switch layer… Like I said, it’s tedious but rendering reviews goes fast. As timing goes there is not much you can do anymore once all your switch layers are imported and the waypoints are set. I tried moving a few keyframes in the hope the wayoints would follow but that resulted in crashes so you have to make sure that your timing is set before you render the png’s that you will use to compose later on. If you want to reuse animations you can always park all your pngs with the right timing in the beginning of the scene and use the time layer to reveal everything when needed. I think you could do the same technique using a list file instead of a switch layer, but then you have to control the animation in a spread sheet which acts like an x-sheet. It is worth testing what would be the fastest.
Greetz!
I bet we can script this if we know FPS in the original scene (and we do). Then all waypoints can be added automatically. Also, lst file seems interesting too, but I’ve never worked with it. Hmm… Thank you for the information, I can see now that things aren’t so grim as I thought.
Hi!
The preliminary tests I did so far with the lst file work well. There are scripts that can convert png’s into a lst file and you can use the time offset parameter to control the time when a lst file has to appear on the canvas. Also all the transformation functions like the ones on the group transformation widget seem to work with it and you can copy them and change the time offset of the copy without changing the original. With lst files I could have had numerous fireworks instead of one by just making a few copies and change the position and the timing with the time offset parameter of each copy. Seems very good to use in scenes with lots of heavy effects that strain the cpu.
Greetz!
