My name is Kuzma, I am 19 years old and I’m from St. Petersburg, Russia.
At first I started to learn and use Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Flash, but recently (six months ago) decided to use free software, so that’s how I first found GIMP and now Synfig.
I guess this is the tool I need to make my dreams of creating cartoons real, but as I am no good artist I also need some good drawing tutorials and advise how to make cartoons better, so I would appreciate any help.
I’m very interested in 2d-animation, want to have hobby creating cartoons, like Adventures of Tintin or Redwall. For now I’ve got an idea to create a fan 2-5 minutes cartoon based on my favorite chapter of The Edge Chronicles series by Paul Stewart and Chris Riddle.
By the way, I walked through some tutorials on synfig wiki, but got stuck on one tutorial with flower: when I try to link a vertex on the top of the sterm with a petal origin, the petal position changes (moves high above canvas) I do not know why this happens and have no idea how do I get rid of this effect.
Anyway, hi all!
Hi Kuzma, welcome to the forums.
For any kind of animation style and any tool used I recommend to pick one animation book and learn from it. The Animator Survival Kit is a good one but there are other as good as them.
Regarding to the flower tutorial, please review step by step the tutorial. One missing step cal make it to fail. If you persists on the same problem, please provide a copy of the working file just before the problem happens. I’ll take a look to it and to the tutorial in case.
-G
Yeah, thanks, The Animator Survival Kit seems to be a good one, for making a kind of start at least.
I tried again with the flower tutorial and now it worked almost fine, the petal position changed not so dramatically as in my previous try. I think I’m having some troubles because I haven’t got used to synfig yet. Also I’ve found out that some interface elements in my version of synfig displayed not the same way as they are shown on screenshots in the wiki. For example, to “group” several layers I click “encapsulate”. The vertexes, that do not exist in some frames marked not as “dyn”, but with a chain simbol. Such things make understanding no easier. (I’m using Windows version of synfig for now).
Thanks again for a book.
Windows version still in 0.63.05 and we are working hard to provide the new shiny 0.64.0 version to Windows. From 0.63 to 0.64 there is a terminology change and some of the icons have been reworked. Accordingly, the wiki has been changed to match the latest version.
Please update to 0.63.05 as soon as possible and to 0.64.0 when we release it.
synfig.org/cms/en/download/stable
Cheers!
-G
Ok, thanks for what you doing, it’s really great, I belive a lot of talanted people have already made some great cartoons using Synfig and a lot cartoons are still going to be created, so keep it up!
I have the same problem of the flower petal position moving high above the canvas when I try to link. Did you find a solution?
-thanks