more question about Synfig

Once again, the more i advance and learn, the more questions i have; first i have to ask about something basic, groups.

I read in the wiki and tried myself to learn what groups do or what are they for, i haven’t found what they do yet or what they can do for helping me in task as animating or drawing, are groups meant for applying certain filters only to those groups or something?, they replace, help or work as encapsulated layers? also the canvas browser doesn’t seem to do anything in my projects at the moment, what it does? why i can’t explore my current project on it?.

also while drawing some project i noticed that ‘Duplicate’ layer is actually very useful, the only downside is that i couldn’t found any ‘obvious’ way to use the duplicate layer in a different ‘Encapsulated’ layer, or otherwise make the duplication of one layer inside a different encapsulated layer, can this be achieved even if takes complicated process of exporting values?

thank you in advance, and btw, remember i said i already revised and read the Wiki and the Documentation, so it’s like i just don’t understand by myself how all this goes.

Grouped layers are not replacing encapsulates, it’s more a way of selecting multiple objects.
They’re a help in quickly selecting different layers that are scattered all around your animation.

The most obvious way to use duplicated layers in different encapsulation layers is to drag them there in the layers panel.

Grups are just a way to refer to scattered different layers with an easier way. Current behavior of grups are:

  1. Double click the group select all the layers in the group
  2. Encapsulate the layer, Lower/Raise the layer in the layers stack, Delete the layer and change its description.
    In fact we can do whatever we want with layers in the group as well as you do in the layers stack. The problem is that the actions are not coded yet.
    The groups are not aimed to replace the encapsulated layers. They are just a way to perform actions to layers at the same time. Or a way to access layers easily.

Canvas browser is used at the moment to double click and open the canvas in its own window (timeline, keyframes, and its own stuff)

The duplicate layers produce two effects:

  1. Automatically produces a exported value node (not removable) that is called index1, index2, etc.
  2. To all the layers that are in the context of the Duplicate layer the parameters that uses the index are evaluated form the “from” to the “to” subparameters of the index parameter.

If you want to use two identical duplicate layers (same index) in two different places you have to connect (export and link) the subparameter (from, to, step) in order to produce the same index loop with the same values. Duplicate the Duplicate layer doesn’t use the same index value (it creates a new one which has identical from, to and step values but are not linked (you modify one and the other doesn’t follow)). That’s the way it works. It could be better yes :wink:

you’re welcome.

-G

:mrgreen:i knew it was actually possible by that obvious mean, just that i never thought on export the 3 values, but already guessed i should be connecting common values from one layer to another, i see now i’m learning also a little bit of the logic of Synfig which is good =D. thank you Genete and Rylleman