Hello, everyone!
We have a kind of anniversary - let’s celebrate weekly report #40!
Last week Ivan made a final touches for Bone-Driven Image Distortion feature. Here’s a list of fixes:
- Added “Reset Pose” action
- Fixed bug when Skeleton Distortion didn’t worked inside of transformed group (#637)
- Windows build is fixed now
Watch the demonstration - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDnIJrjT6jM
Download testing packages - http://www.synfig.org/cms/en/download/development
So, the April month is over, what about May?
We have a great news - our fundraising campaign for May have successfully reached its goal and that means Ivan will continue working on Synfig in this month!
The final contribution towards the goal was made by Rob Lefrandt, who have claimed a “Chose Priority” reward. And his choice is… SOUND! So, this month Ivan will work to bring the sound support into Synfig.
Congratulations to all Synfig users with one more month of full-time development and my deep thanks to the brave 10 contributors, who supported campaign!
On May 3rd me and Ivan had an initial brainstorming session for Sound feature. First of all, we would like to bring JACK support, to make possible have a synced timeline with professional DAWs (like Ardour).
There is already work in progress on the topic by Cillian de Róiste - github.com/cillianderoiste/synf … -transport
So, our first step will be to finish this feature and bring it into master branch.
The JACK feature will be great for users who want advanced sound features, but it requires an additional setup (i.e. launching JACK server and external sound application). This probably will be too much for most of the users, who just want a simple background sound or a few sound FX.
That’s why, after adding JACK we would like to put our efforts into implementing a more “casual” way of working with sound - we plan to work on the Sound Layer.
The ideas about Sound Layers were bumping a long time ago, you can find some of them here and here. There are lot of things to consider here. For example, for most users it is necessary to see a waveform during the work on the animation. Another my concern is that the Synfig’s parameter/waypoints mechanism is not the most comfortable way to work with sound. It’s quite possible we will go after implementing a separate workarea to visualize (and edit) audio tracks, much like the same as we have a graphic objects visualized (and edited) on the regular workarea (canvas).
Still, I can’t give any promises right now. One month is obviously not enough to bring a full-featured audio editor into Synfig, but we will do our best to deliver as much as possible in that period, It’s just good time to think about the “whole picture”.
Before I finish my weekly report, I would like to mention one more contribution, which is coming from Carlos López Gonzalez.
He is working on adding the new way to display keyframe captions on the workarea. At the moment the workarea is displaying the name of current keyframe in the top-left corner. The idea is to improve this visualization by adding the information about previous and next keyframes. The feature is basically ready, just a few touches missing.You can read more about it here - github.com/synfig/synfig/pull/137
That’s all for today. See you in my next report!
