How to re-use characters and animations in several scenes?

I am trying to do long and complex animation, with same characters used in several scenes. Because complexity, it has several scenes, and every scene will be in separate sifz file.

I have created every character in separate sifz file.

  1. For every scene, I create new animation. Then I import character. Then starts trouble:
    when doing anything to character (moving bones), synfig wants to have original open, and all changes are done to that. Should I make separate copy of each sifz file containing character, so that there is copy of original character file for each scene?

And what about characters that should be multiplied, for army of soldiers I have one soldier, how to make dozen of them?

  1. I am trying to follow steps in https://wiki.synfig.org/Doc:Reuse_Animations for makeing re-usable animation. However, on step ‘Double click exported canvas’, opened canvas is much smaller. I have preferences set to have 1280x720 canvas, but when opening exported canvas with double click, I get much smaller, and canvas showing only one arm from my character. I can change size of canvas, but my character will be also resized so that still I see only one arm.

What is supposed workflow and way to work?

I did also screen capture to show how exported canvas works for me:

Ok, looks like this works:

  • Create character, keep as original
  • Make copy of the file
  • Create animation to copy of the file
  • Make separate copy of file for each scene you want to use same character and same animation (for example walk)

On a quick test, duplication of soldiers, make animation, and duplicate group and move to another location seems to work.

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Hi, great! I did record this but take me a little to upload de video. Glad that you found a way to work.

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Thanks for great video!

However, that strange behaviour of exported canvas still remains. That would be problem if I would want to combine two separate things in same character. For example character which would talk while walking.

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Yeah that is a different case, and you need exported canvases. So you don’t need to change the canvas resolution in the first place, because you are working with vectors and the resolution does not matter until you have to render images or sequences. I tried to explain better in the video.

Anyway that is the only work around for that problem that I can think of. I reported the bug here. But don’t expect to be resolve in any moment soon… That doesn’t happen to much. :zipper_mouth_face:

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Well… @tavasti this it’s fixed! couple of minutes ago this was fixed, thanks @KonstantinDmitriev. Let’s try it!

Great news!

For linux, I can build fixed version, but is there windows build available for latest git revision? My daughter uses windows, and she needs that fix also.

You can read how to build in Windows here or wait until they make a new development version release. (I don’t know when this will happen)

Looks like changing canvas size does not change anything, so maybe the best option for now is change resolution of all created files this far, and reset preferences to default.

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