Newbie animation question

Hi all, got a question about animating with canvases. This isn’t exactly what I did but it’s the same idea -

I drew a face with no particular expression using seperate layers for the nose, mouth, eyes etc… and then grouped all the layers together into a group layer called “Home”.

I duplicated the home group layer, changed the vertices so the face is frowning, and renamed this new group layer to “frown”.

I duplicated the home group layer again, changed the vertices so the face is smiling, and reanamed this new group layer to “smile”.

I then exported each group layer to a canvas so looking in the canvas browser I have three canvases - “Home”, “frown”, and “smile”.

I go into animate mode, go to frame 1, set the canvas parameter to “Home”, right click and set the waypoint interpolation to linear for both in and out.

At frame 8 I set the canvas parameter to “frown”, right click and set the waypoint interpolation to linear for both in and out.

At frame 16 I set the canvas parameter to “smile”, right click and set the waypoint interpolation to linear for both in and out.

At frame 24 I set the canvas parameter to “Home”, right click and set the waypoint interpolation to linear for both in and out.

The idea is that during a one-second animation the face goes from expressionless, to frowning, to smiling, then back to expressionless.

I turn off animation mode and render the scene but I’m not getting linear interpolation. At frame 7 the facial expression is still at “Home” then at frame 8 jumps immediately to “frown”.

How do I get this to render with linear interpolation so the mouth moves smoothly from shape to shape?

Thanks.

Hi!
Basically you are doing frame to frame animation with only three frames and you are expecting that Synfig handles the inbetweens and delivers a smooth transition, but the advert that Synfig eliminates the tweening process is a bit misleading. If you want smooth transitions when you use exported canvases then you will either have to make more drawings (aka more exported canvases) or edit, using your example, the mouth spline and or the eyebrows splines at different keyframes in animation mode so that they change over time.
Greetz!

Thanks for the reply - got it to work, I set a keyframe for each mouth position and just duplicated and pasted them where needed. Get smooth animation now. :slight_smile:

Strange thing though, now Synfig crashes every time I try to do anything with the keyframes - If I try to copy a keyframe, delete a keyframe, change the time or duration, Synfig crashes… I must have set something wrong but I don’t know what… no biggie, it was just a test anyway, I’ll figure it out.

Thanks again!