I’d like to make letters appear one by one in a title sequence. Sorta like this. But I don’t want to animate them individually. That would get extremely repetitive. I’d like to be able to make the animation once, and then say “apply it to this letter”, then “apply it to the next letter with a frame or two delay”, and so forth.
Is there a way to make some sort of animation and then apply it as a transform or something on top of a group or letter, and then make a copy of that animation, delay it, and apply it on top of another letter?
You can use switchlayer.separate your world to letter in differnt layers.and then put them into a swithlayer.animate the parameter active layer of the switchlayer.you will get what you want.
Unfortunately there isn’t a easy way, Synfig doesn’t have support to animate letters, words, paragraph individually, you have to split up the letter/words and then animate them. You can easily delay them, by wrapping each element in group and changing the parameter of Time Offset.
Synfig doesn’t have a feature like Range Selector as available in After Effects.
Implementing Range Selector would make Synfig suitable for text animation.
Thanks, but that’s not quite what I was looking for. Imagine animating one character to bounce up and then down. And I want each letter of a sentence to do the same. But I want them to do it in a sequence rather than at the same time, so that it’s like the sentence is doing the wave (or a worm crawl). But I was hoping to not have to animate each character one at a time. That I could somehow “copy” the animation from one char to the next and delay it a little bit so that one letter starts going up just as the one before it was heading down.
I think what microvswind meant is something like this. Unfortunately it does require lots of work (duplicating, moving keyframes, etc).
Make a layer for each separate letter e.g. A, then B, then C, which can be a bit troublesome because you have to place them correctly in the postion you want.
Put layer A in a Group (lets name it Group 1)
Instead of animating the values of layer A, animate the Group 1 layer (values will change in the Transformation parameters). Alternatively and BETTER, use a Layer instead e.g. New Layer - Transform - Translate, above the layer A within that Group 1. When you record and move the points of that layer, it will affect the layer beneath it (in this case A), and keyframes will be placed for that layer (not on layer A).
Add more animation using layers but still within Group 1. You will notice even though each layer’s have their own keyframes, when you click on the Group 1 layer, all the keyframes will be ‘combined’ under Canvas value.
Essentially, you have made an animation set. Duplicate Group 1, let’s say as Group 2 and 3. Either (i) Drag layers B and C into Group 2 and 3 respectively, and delete the layer A in them, or (ii) change layer A in Group 2 to letter B, Group 3 to letter C and move them in place.
Now, if you play the whole file, each letter will start from the beginning but all with the same animation. So to move the keyframes, there are 2 ways, e.g. for Group 2: (i) click the Group 2 layer, first click the first keyframe, the ctrl-click the rest of the keyframes to select them all. Then you can move it to the starting frame that you want, e.g. frame 2. Or EASIER, (ii), click Group 2. In the parameter window, there is a value name of Time Offset. To move the keyframes to frame 2, you would have to type in -2f (negative value). You can’t do this if you animated the Transformation of the Group layer (you have to move the keyframes) - that is why Layers are better.
Continue with the next Group, in this case Group 3, and move all the keyframes to the next interval you want, e.g. frame 4.
So I guess that’s the one long way to do it. For most animations, you can use LAYERS instead of manipulating the values of the layer. Some, like color or stroke reveal, you have to work on the layer itself, so you can’t ‘copy’ that animation to another layer.
