Question for Ya: I noticed that Synfig does not yet have a tool equivalent to the “Brush Tool” in Flash. The closest thing I was able to find was the Sketch tool, and I feel that with enough messing around with the Sketch tool, it could be REALLY useful with regards to drawing in frames.
Any chance we could be seeing such a tool soon? And if so, would I be able to animate my drawings without need of using tools like the Bline? Reason why I ask is because I also kind of would like the option to inbetween my own drawings, rather than having the program inbetween it. I would also like to freehand my drawings, if possible.
Hi Caelan,
unfortunately there is not prevision to have a raster fbf support in a shor time. Current set of developers is too narrow and their free time is limited.
Anyway it has been requested previously to have a kind of raster layer (similar to what Sketch Tool offers) that gives the artist the opportunity to draw the keyframes inside Synfig Studio rather than import them form other raster application. But I never have heard about don’t let Synfig Studio do the inbetweens. One of the strongest features of Synfig is its resolution independence in space and time thanks to the vector storage of the information. Raster animations are great and the freedom of draw what you want on each frame is awesome but it has some limitations in the space and time resolutions (it doesn’t admit increase the output size or increase the sampling frequency without loose infromation. That doesn’t happen in vector world and that’s why never has been requested a full fbf raster support (with the implications that it have regarding to brushes, filters, color handling, selections, and all the features that the great raster drawing applications have).
We are in the mood of add a basic fbf support to help artist draw its keyframes which will be later traced using vectors. Anyway not in a short time
I’ve been drawing a lot of stuff with my Wacom Tablet in programs like MyPaint and Gimp, and thought it’d be cool to just do that in Synfig without having to import, like you indicated before.
For the time being, I guess I’ll just work around it.
I think the drawing facility could help during the storyboard/animatic stage. Unfortunately, the sketch tool is not very useful on that. It would be good to have three modes: animatic, modelling (actual vector drawing) and animation. The drawing features located on the animatic mode. I guess it is a lot of development time though.
What could be a good alternative to create storyboard/animatic (in linux)? any recommendations? I use mypaing and gimp but it would be good to have something that can use onionskin and frames…
I think the sketch tool should really be called “Grease Pencil” as it is in Blender, as that’s what it is - it’s not for sketching.
I’m doing character animation at the moment, and I use the sketch tool to draw arcs for arm movement and circles on heads to help me to animate features on head-turns.
What the sketch tool is intended for - being a grease pencil - it does perfectly. In my view (which may be wrong!) if you’re doing vector animation then you shouldn’t really be thinking in terms of sketching in Synfig anyway - that sort of animation is what Pencil ( pencil-animation.org/ ) is for.
Pencil is perfect for animatics too.
I do my sketches on paper or in The GIMP and then trace over them in Synfig.
