Hello!

Hello everyone! I have long been interested in animation, cartoons, drawing and art in general. Alas, the promise of more steady work and a steady paycheck has taken me in a different path. However, since I have found this site and program, I want to get back into doing some creative things! As of yet I haven’t created any animations in Synfig, I have however created some lip sync using powerdirector…but I want to do real animation so that is why I am here. I’m sure I will have plenty of questions for you all, and learning this will be a challenge, but I look forward to it! I’m not sure if I should ask here or find the appropriate area, but here goes.

My first question is this. I want to create a practice for myself. I have all of the shapes I need (mouth shapes that is, the head/body will remain static for this exercise). What I want to know is this. Can I import all the mouth/eye shapes onto different layers, and then using keyframes just have them appear when I want them to? (and then hide the layer with the mouth shape that appeared again when I want a different mouth shape). I am doing cut out animation, and all the cut outs are imported, encapsulated, and ready to go, just can’t figure out how to get it animated. (Oh, and have all my time codes via Jlipsync open so I can just put in the phoneme mouth shape where it needs to be).

Hope that wasn’t confusing to anyone…I know what I want it to do, just not sure I explained it properly.

Hi lawnmower70, welcome to the forums.

For layer visibility we primary use the ‘Amount’ parameter of the layer. Setting it to zero will make the layer invisible and setting it to 1.0 will make the layer full visible. Using ‘Constant’ interpolation would make animation easier.

There are other techniques to “swirch” between layers (or group of layers) but that requires a more complex setup than the simple modification of the amount parameter. On contrary, once made the setup, the animation control is easier.

Checkout this tutorial for initial version of advanced techniques. If you get loose, get back to the basics of the manual.

wiki.synfig.org/wiki/Doc:Reuse_Animations

-G

Thank you for the tips! I’ll defenitly check it out and let you know how it turns out.