My computer mouse had broken and had to buy replacement. Had to wait for several days because I’m far from civilization. I had bought one just now and want to begin with my new project that Genete suggested to me: make an animated avatar of my alter ego.
So to start, I would like to know how to make one. Did anyone had experience in making one? What is the image size? The frame rate? Number of frames? Had anyone have any tips and advice in making one? Thanks.
Hi Ralmon,
According to the forum settings (I can see them as I’m admin) the avatar rules are:
If the avatar is linked from remote website then the size of the file in bytes shouldn’t be so large to avoid unnecessary bandwidth.
First of all you should test the creation of animated gif directly from Synfig Studio using Magick++ target (not ImageMagic because it would produce a gif sequence and not the built in ‘gif’ target that produces very bad optimized gif files). Magic++ produces very good optimized and without artifacts animated gif files.
Once checked that then create your animation at any size that fits the proportions you want to your avatar considering that it must fit in a maximum proportions of 3:2. For the time you need to render the final result you can always scale to the final dimensions (150x100) regardless of the original dimensions of the project, thanks to the vector capacities of Synfig.
For a perfect result, the animation loop the frame past the end of the animation should fit the first frame, so the loop doesn’t have a jump on each cycle.
From there, you can give freedom to your imagination…
-G
I think I’m cursed. It turns out, my new mouse does not work very well. I does not draw that smooth. I draw a curve and it creates a wiggly line. Might have to buy again because I hate using it to draw.
Also is planning to buy a scanner so that I could just scan my drawings.
While waiting for an opportunity I keep sketching and designing.
I also upload a quick sketch I made.
Have you tried using a drawing tablet? You can get a wacom bamboo rather cheap and it’s a good one.
A mouse is a way too clumsy tool for drawing, like trying to hit a nail with a rock.
That’s a very nice lizard head!
What would it do during animation? Show and hide the tongue?
-G
Hi Rylleman,
No, I haven’t. Technology is far away from where I live 
and a graphics tablet of any kind is rare to see. I’m planning in buying a scanner this week so that I could use my drawings directly. Would buy a graphics tablet in the future.
Genete:
Thanks, I’m just sketching quick, the design is fairly basic, I’m going for a more fancy design. I’m going to animate a walk cycle, so I have to draw the body too. The scanner would come in handy 
.
Did I take more than I could chew? I did. I just did! My initial idea is WAY too big. It was giving me a headache! Therefore it is scrapped.
I make my project more manageable. Instead of full body animation, I will just work with the head. The head will start at profile, turn a little to look to the audience, then puff some smoke and loop back. I had two poses sketched already.
The “puff smoke” needs a little more thought though. How could I work smoke in Synfig? Do someone know? Could you please tell me?
The poses!
Looks great!
For particles you can use the particles template
wiki.synfig.org/wiki/Particles_V2.0
If you have troubles using it, please let me know.
-G
Yeah! It is done.
I get headaches with this one. I had redone it several times too. Things just don’t go the way I wanted. Glad I made backups so things aren’t all lost. Not that good animation, but, hey, I had made it to the finish.
I encountered some problems that is quite annoying:
Important windows like “preview animation” window and the “save” window gets obstructed by the “keyframe” window and the “Layers” window (did I get them right?) blocking important buttons like the play button and the save button. Why is this?
the outline in the workspace window become “steps” after rotating them with the rotate layer. Ugly!
Well. I’m glad all is done. I did have fun making it.
First of all, good work with the avatar. The smoke effect is great and the dragon movement is fine.
Yes, it is not properly managed in the current windows layout. I also hate it.
It won’t happen in the final render. Please modify the quality value to something lower than 4 for a better (and slower) rotate layer render.
-G
It lives! It breathes! It looks pretty darn cool!
Chris
It probably won’t help you, but if you’re using Linux with the KDE desktop you can specify that particular windows always appear on top of others - I use the KDE settings to fix the Preview Options window appearing under the Preview window.
My apologize here, I intended to merge Preview Option window and Preview window during I was trying to improve Preview window, but due to my spare time, I din’t manage my whole plan happened that period. Please give time, I will continue to complete my plan 
Neat! It looks great! Good work. 