New to the forums, not to Synfig

Hi there!

I have been playing around with Synfig for some time now. Thanks to the examples and work of many of you out there, I have been able to actually start animating some stuff myself. So thank you!

I’m a high school physics teacher and interested in using animation to explain stuff (physics mostly…). To improve my skills, I have started with the 51 exercises I found on Animator Island. Any suggestions for similar exercises for Synfig are most welcome!

Kind regards,
Lowie

4 Likes

I didn’t knew about it until now, but I checked it.
And I don’t think this 51 exercises will be helpful for you if you are going to create animation to explain physics.

The 51 exercises are mostly of character animation and may be suitable for frame by frame style animation. If most of your animation will be technical based, then rather than practicing animation, I think it would be better for you to start learning the software more.

Some important things to learn

  1. Get familiar with the interface
  2. Layers and basic transformations (rotation, scaling, skew, etc.)
  3. Understand how mask works
  4. Converters/Export Value
  5. Exported canvas

I think these are important things to learn if you will be using Synfig for explaining physics. You should really focus on converters and exported value so that you can represent a animation mathematically and will be helpful for you.

One thing that I always tell is, Synfig is vector animation program, so start thinking your animation in interpolation between values / tweening. Rather than frame by frame. If you have any doubts then feel free to ask.

2 Likes

Thank you for your advice!

Indeed, I noticed that the 51 exercises are more focused on frame by frame animation. For a new user such as me, it would be nice to have similar exercises/challenges for Synfig.

I think I am doing well on your steps 1 and 2, and beginning to understand step 3. Yesterday I started to play around with converters, but in a trial and error kind of way. Exported canvas (step 5) is new, so I will look into it.

As for the animations I’m hoping to make: I’ll post some first trials. Not sure what else I might come up with, but as an educator I am inspired by the work of @bbrizzy89 (Med Ed Animation on YouTube).

Hey @Lowie sorry for delay - Thank you so much for the shout out! Good luck with your education work. I’m not always the best about keeping up with these forums but happy to try to be a resource for your educational animation efforts!