My first experience with synfig

Synfig rocks, it is the cause many late nights this week since I downloaded it.

I’ve always written comedy sketches, done portraits and characatures, I thought it was about time I learned how to animate atleast 1 of my skeches. But I don’t think I can do it alone. I started off in pencil and actually made some progress because of how damb simple it is and the choppy effect actually works for my piece, but that program crashes constanlty but one thing it did great was import my vocals from my desktop (from protools) and I could design the piece around the vocals.

I’ve been playing with synfig for about a week now at first it all looked like chinese to me but once I got the ball bouncing and morphing around I was on my way and I really love this program I think it’s the one I’m going to stick with I don’t have the energy to learn another one for now. Went through all the tutorials and read most of this forum and I am making good progress. I have all my characters drawn and figured out in the program and the entire 4 minute piece written. So I’m going to list the particular obstacles I am having in created my first sketch, I am a laymen to animation so please bear with me. I actually have the vocals for the entire piece recorded that’s where I start I always start with the vocals, and that brings me to my first obstacle:

Obstacle 1.

Obviously you can’t import sound like you can in pencil I looked that up and down throughout the forum so I won’t go on about that but being able to do that and see the vibrations write under the timeline to sync to would be the amazing it would solve me biggest hurdle. Ok so we can’t do that, so how do I synk my animation to a premade vocal. Premade vocals are essential in my comedy sketches the timing isn’t preplanned you can’t preplann it the studder and banter of the characters are natural and overlaping it must start with the vocals.

I’ve played a little with the papagayo program suggested, I can import my protools clip into papagayo and synk up the mouth, but can’t seem to import the saved papagayo file into syfig. And what exactly showes up from papagayo when you import? The sound and the mouth? or just the mouth? I don’t think the mouth will cut it my vocals are very studdery and overlapping imagine… A bunch of dumb studerry pigeons with austrailian accents all talking in a group:

P1- I won
P2-Whatja win?
p1- The game
P2- Really?
P1- Yyyeah!!
P3- What game…

I need to find a way to sync up animation to the soundtrack, I am having alot of difficulty figuring this one out. I can bring the sound into a movie maker program and the synked up animation from synfig and allign them, but how do I make the animation first to fit the track?

Obstacle 2:

I can’t figure out how to remove a layer only for a portion of the animation. For example my main scene of a man and pigeon playing chess, the animation will constantly be flicking in between the pigeons head and the mans head in the center of the screen when they are talking, and they talk quickly. When I remove a layer it removes it from the entire animation, so how do I make my man head dissapear and my pigeon head re appear and flick quickly back and forth?

Obstacle 3:

Moving multiple layers. In the biginning of my animation I want the camera to zoom in on the chess board pieces and move horizontally accross them slowy. Now I already got this working, the only problem is I have to move all the layers one by one. So how do I go about lets say just moving the chess board itself without moving every individual square I layered ontop of the board, they need to move with the board. I believe their is no camera layer option right?

Obstacle 4:
Export, I’ve tried rendering small animations many times with many of the options I’ve read on the forum and in videos, still can’t seem to open up the movie, watch it and send it.

Obstacle 5:
This might seem silly and probably so simple but I’ve been playing with all the rotating options spinning all the objects with multiple points but can’t seem to rotate text, and for this particular sketch I need to have verticle text.

Just some things I can’t seem to figure out, any responses would be appreciated thanks.

Nate

Hi Nate,
first of all welcome to the forums. I’m sure you’ll enjoy this small community a lot.

Obstacle 1:
When you import form papagayo you can see the mouth movements with the same mouhts than the papagayo uses. It would help you for reference. Please read carefully this wiki page and let me know if you cannot success.

Obstacle 2 & 3:
See the camera widget here: viewtopic.php?f=8&t=221 read the entire forum post.

Obstacle 4: Please be sure to use one of our binaries from the download page. It will include the ffmpeg renderer target. Choose the render parameters once ffmpeg is selected and choose the proper video codec and bitrate of your taste.

Obstacle 5: Try the attached file.

Good luck!
-G
rotated_text.sifz (703 Bytes)

Hi animationcrazy,
I’ll give you a final and last opportunity. Post cracks of Software is not allowed in this forum. If you want to talk about comparisons of Synfig Studio with other software you’re welcome but any refernce to cracking or illegal downloads will be removed. I won’t give one more opportunity. Next time your posts and your account will be banned.

-G

Ok, just thought some struggleing animators could really use a free full version of toon boom software, won’t mention it again, thanks.