Hello everyone… I’m a professional educator, busy designing a ‘Digital Culture’ culture course for my college.
I’m actually coming to Synfig from extensive experience in 3d animation, mostly in Blender.
I’m a contributing artist for the Makehuman project, but I found the combination of Blender and Makehuman to be too photo-realistic for the story I’ve written called ‘Amorok’. So I decided to go 2d and hand-drawn.
I’ve used Inkscape and Gimp a great deal, but they too also give a very polished look and that’s not what I’m after.
Interestingly enough, I’ve seen several critiques of Synfig that said the learning curve was too steep. (Blender would have killed the poor guys!).
For what it’s worth, I’ve found the best way to sell Synfig as a solution is to start with hand-drawn gesture drawings and walk cycles, and quickly create working videos. I’m thinking the ‘learn vector graphics from scratch in Synfig’ approach is not the way to go, when working with students.
Hello zinc chameleon and welcome here…
Can you take the time to explain?
Sure. I have read several reviews of Synfig that claimed it was difficult to learn. I found the user interface a surprise, but that’s one of the good things about open source apps.
I was referring to leading a group of fine art students with a background in studio drawing into digital culture animation. Such students usually begin with a raster graphic program like Photoshop (which they learned in high school) using its vector plugins, or GIMP, depending on how my school goes. It would take a superior student to handle Inkscape, and then move onto Synfigstudio. This does not diminish the value of Synfigstudio; it simply puts it in the same class of apps as Blender.
Hi!
It’s a misconception that one has to know Inkscape to move onto Synfig. Inkscape is tailored for illustration and stills and Synfig is made for animation. When you make a gradient in Inkscape then you don’t have the same gradient you get in Synfig because the one in Synfig can be animated just like every vertex, line, region can be animated. That is why I always urge people to make their vector drawings straight in Synfig instead of going to Inkscape first.
Greetz!