Need help animating a bouncing object

[keyboard74]

Hi everyone,
I would like some assistance animating a lively orange bouncing forward from the background to the foreground with limbs and a rainbow trail behind. Any ideas on how to do it?
Making the orange bounce shouldn’t be a problem. The difficulty is in how to animate the trail or whatever this is called.
Thanks

The attached image is an AI generated image to give you a rough idea of what i’m looking for.

[Kai]

Do it step by step. First animate the orange body using the scale and shear parameters. Once you’re satisfied with the bounce then start animating the limbs accordingly.

[keyboard74]

Thanks for your reply Kai. I’ve added a few details to my post hoping to make my message, hopefully, easier to understand.

[Lae82]

The jump trail/trail objects can be animated with motion path: https://youtu.be/uF0h8KPdYAM?si=U9wIkBv1Vs2ArFq3

Also some masking can be useful to make the trail fade out after the jump. Maybe duplicate motion path and make an animated mask layer that follows the trail but with a time offset?

Play around and see what works.

[keyboard74]

Very interesting .
To be honest, I’ve never used a motion path in my animations. I’ve already created a step by step movement . I will try to give the motion path a go and see if it can make it any better.

Thank you so much!

[Lae82]

I found one example/solution you can try here.
jump_trail.sifz (3.4 KB)

Advanced outline layers have much more parameters you can fiddle with. Even kind of making the effect you were looking for.

Its based on this thread and Darkspace_be’s solution:

Newbie Q: How do I leave a trail?

Ok, I think I can leave a trail by animating a gradient fill in a rectangle from white to the desired color but I’m making no progress on this. I created the rectangle filled with white, create the gradient and grouped it and the rectangle and set the ONTO. That part seems correct. I then set the start and end gradient color to white. Since this gradient fill trails the red circle I switched to animation mode, added a new key about 1 second behind the red circle and at that key I set the gradi…

[Lae82]

Here’s some more maybe better examples:

path_animation3.sifz (8.7 KB)
path_animation_curvewarp_layer.sifz (7.4 KB)

[keyboard74]

All the examples are great. I’m so grateful! Thank you so much for your help!

[keyboard74]

Hi again,

Here’s the animation that I’ve created thanks to your help .

[Lae82]

Cool ^.^ There was a missing Papagayo file that made Synfig crash for me when trying to preview but now it seems to work after removing the Papagayo lip sync layers.

[rodolforg]

@Lae82

There was a missing Papagayo file that made Synfig crash for me when trying to preview

Where is this layer? I couldn’t see it.
(trying to fix the crash )

[Lae82]

Group > orange 2 > orange > oranges go zing.pgo
…I tried downloading file again and try to reproduce crash and seems to not crash this time. I was basically messing around with deleting Advanced outline trails and Blur layer and Synfig froze first time. Removed pgo/lipsync layer and it seemed to work fine. Downloaded file a second time after PC reboot and no more problem it seems…

[rodolforg]

What is your Synfig Studio version?

[keyboard74]

Sorry about the issues my file caused. Here’s the animation again, this time without the Papagayo file. As you can see, the animation is not perfect, so please feel free to suggest anything that could make it smoother and better.

Regards,
Bouncing orange+trail.sifz (104.0 KB)

[Lae82]

Synfig 1.5.3
I think I had a cpu voltage spike that froze the pc, but its ok again now. I was using some cpu overclock that run ok for most part and improved synfigs preview render time but crashed on this file. Just to give some more details.