New user - engineering purposes

I intend to use Synfig for engineering purposes, unlike most of you all, so I will possibly have suggestions for new features and strange questions.

To start with, I wonder if it is possible to read some parameters from a file and change the animation speed or colours or size according to values read in there. Like at higher temperatures, kettle should vibrate more vigorously or turn red, a faster train should be shown if the velocity read there is higher, higher wind speed should bend trees more, etc. These values could be read by Synfig once a second or something like that.

Hi!

It it awesome that someone wants to use Synfig for industrial purposes. I’m Industrial Engineer and I would love to give you maximum support on your tasks joining my engineering knowledge and my synfig usage and code knowledge.

There is a way to read data form a file that can be used for animation. It is the image sequence. With a little of effort you can pre-render all the possible states, save them to image files and later load them as image sequence, changing the images according to what is written in the file.
It is done by the ListImporter layer.

Apart of this, currently there is not any other external input from file apart of that. I would be very glad to add new features that support that intentions because the possibilities are infinite. :open_mouth:

-G

Alternatively you van create your own sif files with an external application. They are written in xml format so it is easy to write your own ones. There is not public documentation for the sif file format other than the savecanvas.cpp and loadcanvas.cpp files (the code that converts the Synfig memory data to a xml file and vice versa).

There are examples of people doing this to create some kind of special effects like explosions, etc.

quadrochave.com/index.php?op … &Itemid=50
-G

Thank you very much for your support. I am a complete beginner and will therefore very much appreciate it.

I will try to learn the basics in the beginning before endeavouring any significant project. I will be glad to hear of project ideas as well. I am not doing this for my employer, so I have all freedom to decide what to do and how to do it. I just hope that I produce something that can be even slightly useful, may be in PowerPoint presentations or human-less, animal-less cartoons which give a message.

I hope to learn all this in time. Thanks again for your willingness to help.

I hope to get to this point some day. It is nice to know that there will be people like you willing to help if I get stuck. Thanks.