hi, good day.
I’ll try to explaing a little about it, sorry ma bad english and dislexia xDD
1)- I’m working my way through the wiki for Synfig and they mention a Canvas parameter for groups.
Execelent, I learn the same way, looking videos on youtube and helping in some projects, like the first animation of Morevna, I learn a lot seeing the videos of Konstantin Dmitriev in youtube, I dont speak Russian but learn somethings just looking how he made it.
2)- If anyone can point to an example of how this is used, or just explain it I will thank you.
About the Canvas group, Well, I neve really understand was the utility more than have the name of the project or canvas. But you can import another .Sfiz file or “canvas” into the curret project or “canvas”, this is usefull if you want to make a scene with some characters the can vectorize and animated it in his owns .sfiz (canvas) and mix togeder int he final one, this make a pipeline that if you make some change in the original .sfiz file the change automatic.
I’ll leave you this example with one of my works:
This one is the final Scene (without the Background)
01 Final CLS01-03-mix.sifz (1.3 KB)
This are the characters with some animations and filters:
CLS01-03-NoCamaras-CHA.sifz (1.1 KB)
CLS01-03-NoCamaras-XtraA.sifz (1.2 KB)
CLS01-03-NoCamaras-XtraB.sifz (1.2 KB)
And this are the same character with the cycle moves
CLS01-03CHA.sifz (25.0 KB)
CLS01-03xtra-A.sifz (20.4 KB)
CLS01-03xtra-B.sifz (24.8 KB)
You must need have all the 7 files in the same Folder to make the Final Mix file works (I hope XDD)
You can see this are some .sifz files in the layers group, but in the Canvas Group just show the final canvas.
3)- Why would you not just swap in different jpgs at different points of the animation?
Because Synfig is a Vector animation program, then the Idea is that you make some shapes and when you make the animation have the option of make changes in the same shapes, is a little like Flash, but the first that you have to learn is that Synfig Layers and TimeLine are two diferent things, this is a little hard to learn because int he other programs for 2D animation timeline and layers work in the same window, this take me like a 1 or 2 years to understanding, then you can have layers.