I just found Synfig, and it looks amazing. I am quite new to animation in general, but I would like to make walk cycles of both four legged animals and humans. You talk about both morphing and cut-out animations. I am not sure I understand how morphing works, but I followed the cut-out tutorial in the manual (wiki.synfig.org/wiki/Doc:Cut-out_Animation). Now my animals have more joints than that figure, the humans also have elbows and so on. Will the cut-out also work here to create a bone-like system or how do I do this with Synfig?
Hi neigaard! welcome to the forums.
Walk cycles are the touchstone of any animator, so be patience on obtain good results.
It is possible to do walk side cycles with cut out style or morphing style. But cut out style (as described in the tutorial) is a bit constraining, because you have fixed length for the limbs of the character all the time. In most of the cases it is not true, because the projected lengh of a liimb can change when it is not parallel to the proyection plane and that happens in many walk cycle types.
In any of both styles the procedure is similar. You need to draw your keyframes first to have them as references. There are lots of tutorials at internet to get the basic keyframes for a walk cycle. One of the most mentioned is this one: idleworm.com/how/anm/02w/walk1.shtml. Once placed the keyframes you need to match them with your stuff (cut out or morphing) and the interpolation will do the rest. Of course you sure will need to fix the intermediate interpolations made by the computer by adding new waypoints where needed.
Also you have to decide first which walk cycle you want to do: in place or across the screen. The second one is more difficult because it is more time consuming and requires more usage of onion skin. I would start by the ‘in place’ one.
Yes I do not expect to master the walk cycle for quite some time, but at least a result I can be pleased with
The reason I lean to cut-out is that I can understand it. I do my drawings in Inkscape and finish them up in a raster program, and I can understand how Synfig can animate my figures if I cut them into movable pices, but how can Synfig make a animation by morphing a complete drawing? Will it work well even with the details in the drawing or will Synfig distort my figure?
Does interpolation work for both morphing and cut-out? So if I use cut-out I do not have to make every single move my self I can just make the key frames?
I have seen your four legged walk and it is great! I am no where near that level at all
I am doing in place walk cycle luckily as I am trying to use Synfig to produce the frame png’s for a simple childrens game.
Because your complete drawing is made of Synfig’s morpheable components. To be able to morph in Synfig Studio you need to have your artwork made with Synfig primitives and so, modify them along the time on animation mode. If you use cutout, what you can animate is only the rotations of the limbs but not the limbs itself if they are raster ones. Not at last inside Synfig because Synfig is vector animation, not raster animation.
But for both the principles are the same. Draw Keyframes outiside (raster), import them inside Synfig Studio, match keyframes along the time (using cout out or vector items), refine inbetweens. That’s the recipe.
-G
I really like your walking dog and I would like to try this morphing technique. Now I new to everything here (drawing and animation), you would not happen to know of a full tutorial where a animal (or man) is drawn from scratch and animated (preferably a walk cycle) in Synfig? It would be great with a video tutorial on how you made your dog
I am working hard to learn this Just did a test with cut-out and it became quite mechanical. I am sure I can improve it, but I would like to try out the morphing way.
Unfortunately I spend all my free time coding Synfig and trying to fix the bugs when possible. There is a very similar tutorial for a walking man here: wiki.synfig.org/wiki/Walk_Cycle
Have you tried to follow it?
Notice that it is tagged as advanced, so I would recommend to do the basic ones to get used to the animation concepts and the interface.
-G
I am working my way through the tutorial right now, but with a four legged animal I am drawing. Now the .lst file in the example has repeated the .jpg files, why is that and does it matter if the image files are only listed once? I am quite new to all, so could you maybe help me out by explaining a little on frame rates? I mean in your walking dog example it seems there are 5 key frames, so for get that to work in the walk tutorial with a .lst file, what would the frame rate be and then how log should the total animation be?
I know, I ask totally newbie questions, but I try my best
The image file would just read the images and place them at the given frame rate. If FPS in the lst flie is 10 then there is one image shown each 1/10 seconds. It will happen regardless your animation fps (that probably may be 24 fps). So the FPS in the lst file is just the frequency of how the images are read. In our example, a FPS=10 and 4 images would only move during the first 4*1/10=0.4 seconds. The lst FPS determines how quick or slow do the images change.
Usually, walk cycles are symmetrical, so left leg looks similar to right leg on the half walk cycle. So usually the images are only drawn for half a complete cycle. That’s why most of the time the half cycle is repeated twice.
The frame rate FPS in the lst file would be what ever you want. If higher animation is quicker, if lower animation is slower. The length of the cycle would be twice the number of images multiplied by the inverse of the FPS in seconds.
-G
What I probably need the most with frame rates is a feeling for frame rates… I mean, what FPS makes a smooth walk cycle and so on. Any tips for stuff to read that might aid me here?
I am working on a four legged animation when ever I have the time, so there might be more questions coming along.
Frames per second is not related to walk smoothness. It is related to sampling. I can create a very low smooth walk cycle at 60 fps (which is a very sampled animation!) and I can create a very smooth walk cycle at 12 fps. Ovbiously if you reduce the fps below some certain limit the human brain will distinguish the differences betwen frames. 24 fps is the standard that makes the human’s brain to invent or replace non existing frames based on the really visible frames. Below 12 fps, the human eye uses to “see” the difference between frames dues to the persistence of the image on the brain. So basically, frames per second is the sampling of the source to the viewer’e eye. The higher fps the higher sampling.
Other thing is the FPS from the lst file. If you have four keyframe images of the walk cycle, and you want a quick walk cycle you need to set its FPS to a high value. It means that the walk cycle is repeated closer in time, and so it is quicker. In the other way, you can create a very slow walk cycle (set FPS in the lst file to 2 - that is two keyframes per second-) and insert it in a supersampled animation with a fps of 60.
A normal walk cycle (full walk) would be completed in one second (24 frames for a 24 fps file) so if your image samples are four and they are half a cycle you need to set the FPS to be 8. If the walk cycle is fully completed in half a second, it is called “march rate” and then your FPS for the lst file must be 16.
For learning more about animation in general and walk cycles in particular, I strongly reccomend to buy The Animator Survival Kit. It worths each penny. I can’t stay away from it when doing animations.
I have made my very first drawing in Synfig and have tried to animate my Boar based on your dog walk cycle post. It jitters around some but I can probably fix that with some adjustments, but there are some things that eludes me. I have 5 keyframes like in your dog walk cycle example, but are they placed correctly for the 24 FPS animation? Also how do I get my animation to repeat properly?
I have attached the sifz file if you have the time to give it a quick look.
You don’t need to exactly follow the 1 second rule for a peaced full walk. If your full walk has 10 frames (5+5) you can make it on 10 frames (quick), 20 frames (average) or 30 frames (average to slow). But remember that those 5 keyframes haven’t strictly the same time period between them. You can make some of them quicker and other faster and make the walk much more interesting. To be able to do that you can specify the FPS on your lst file to be the same than the final animation (24 fps) and duplicate the file references in the lst file to full full the desired walk peace:
Have you made 8 key frames in your dog walk sifz? I thought that the gif displayed the 5 key frames needed for a good dog walk cycle? I am gonna buy that book you recommended for sure, but until then more newbie questions from me
If you look carefully to the images of the dog, walk1.png and walk4.png are exactly the same if you change left with right legs. So in fact the half cycle is a 4 images length and the total walk is 8 images length.
Phew its been a steep learning curve so far… Animation is amazingly time consuming I learned a lesson today: avoid having to many ducks in the parts of the drawing that will be animated.
I will take a weekend break from animation now to try an preserve some sanity
