New trying to be synfig user!

General Introductions
1

Hi everyone,

I want to enter into the world of the animation. I began using creatoon which is a cut-out software. I liked it, it was easy to use and the results quite good. But some stuff was not easy to do: change the brightness of your character, put a shade, face movement and a lot of other. That is why I decided to change… and finally to try to use Synfig!
For what I have seen, it seems great and has a lot of options, this is very nice and I am still discovering how to use them. Nevertheless, the technique to make animation is very different and I am a bit lost…for example how to make a animation of a character and how to make his face moving (Bline, of course…). If somebody can help me to discover how to make these simple animations, it would be very great.

Thanks for your help!
Bye

2

Animation proccess is not a simple task. It is also not related to a particular program or workflow.
In a few words and for Synfig related:

  1. Draw your key poses in paper and pencil (or any other device you like) and convert them into digital image
  2. Import the images and set its visibility properly. It is like create a storyboard within synfig.
  3. Study carefully each pose and select a good setup of the layers to transform between a kyframe and other with the meinimum tweking needed between keyframes.
  4. Draw first keyframe and transform the blines to match the other keyframes at the proper time.
  5. Add as much waypoints between each keyframe to match a good transition.

You can visit morevnaproject.org to see examples of this workflow.

Good luck and welcome!.
-G

3

Hi Genete,

Thank you for your answer, it is much more clearer know. If I have nice results I will share them with you…

4

Hi…
I am trying to do some stuff with synfig and know it is arrived the moment to render it…but I have a problem.
I want to render my work. As I have seen, it is better to export it first from synfig to png images and then using a command line to covert it to movie. I followed the tutorial but when I enter my line of command, it answers me than ffmpeg is unknow. What is going on? I am working on windows vista.

Thanks

5

Those commands are for a unix environment. I think that you can download ffmpeg for windows and call it from the DOS prompt. Anyway there are some other free applications that can do that work nicely if you don’t want the command line. Avidemux and Blender are two examples. Goggle it a bit and you’ll find some others. Even windows native :wink:

-G