Introducing myself

Hi dear Synfiggers,

I’m an independent theatre and video director, former CG Animator (1988-2007, Canada … almost one of the 2nd-gen “pioneers”) and sometime visual artist now living in Berlin, Germany. Both as part of my theatre work and simply out of an old yearning, I want to get back into animation. I work by choice on Mac now, where I do my graphics and video editing.

On re-entering this world, I realized that much has changed, but a lot has stayed the same. Such as still apparently no all-around top-rated, affordable general-purpose, hybrid animation software for “artsy” projects combining painting, object animation, video etc.

Basically, I’m looking to cover 3 techniques as cheaply and flexibly as possible: Vector/object-based, stop-motion, and painterly. For some reason, either aesthetic or because too much stress and heartache was involved at the time I worked in this, I want to avoid 3D.

  1. For the vector-animation side, I am not that interested in delving into the Behemoth that is Flash (though maybe as an Apple user I’m just biased) on the one hand or buying up every “little” supposedly powerful software out there to find something that might … just … do what I need it to. Hence the promise of open-source and synfig (if I can ever get it installed)!

I must say that it is not easy to find Synfig when searching for 2D animation software. Not sure why. I only ran across it via the site for Pencil, which is easy to find but seems to have stalled in development at the moment.

  1. Stop-motion seems to be well covered by a number of affordable, apparently both user-friendly and professionally used, software.

  2. On the painterly- animation side, the software that most closely seems to do what I want is TVPaint, but cheap it is not. If anyone is aware of an open-source project or low-cost alternative in this direction, please let me know!

Here’s hoping I’m in the right place!

All the best,

Goesta

Welcome goestas!

I hope you’ll be able to install Synfig on your mac. Zelgadis is trying now to get a proper build for it, http://synfig.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=3418, please join in testing this so we finally will get a stable, easily installed mac version.

For your #3. there is an animation extension to Mypaint which lets you do painted animation. Mypaint is an excellent painting software. The animation branch is however quite early in development, there are for example no layers functionality. nonetheless it has great potential to become something fantastic.
http://libregraphicsworld.org/blog/entry/customized-mypaint-gains-animation-for-a-new-open-movie-project

Good luck with your return to animation!

Already there, thank you :wink:

Will check it out right now, thank you so much for your blazing quick feedback! I’m definitely at the right place, I can smell the passion!

Cheers

Welcome to the forum - I hope that when the Mac build is finally complete you’ll have a lot of fun with Synfig Studio.