(Open-source) Animated short made with Synfig

General Synfig news discussion
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Hello everyone!

My name is Konstantin Dmitriev. You probably know me as a person behind all our crowdfunding campaigns for Synfig development. Also, I am author of Morevna Project Demo animated short.

I have a good news: NEW ANIMATED SHORT MADE WITH SYNFIG COMING SOON.

Right now I am working on the new animated short from Morevna series which is going to be released in June 2016. As part of the production of this animated short my team is testing and improving Cobra - the new optimized rendering engine of Synfig.

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The animated short will be released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, together with all its sources, so you can use them for learning and modifications. Much like the Blender’s open movies do.

Key highlights of the project:

  1. CREATED WITH FREE SOFTWARE - We use only free/open-source software: Synfig Studio (animation), Krita (artwork), Blender (editing and 3D effects), Papagayo (lipsync), RenderChan (rendering management).
  2. FREE AND OPEN-SOURCE - The result of our work will be free to watch and distribute for everyone under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. All animation sources also will be published under the same license, so you can use them for learning or create remixes.
  3. PROFESSIONAL VOICING - the Russian voicing is produced by recording studio of Reanimedia Ltd. - the leading anime distributor in Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and the Baltic States.
  4. PREVIEWS AVAILABLE - $3+ Patrons can access current “work-in-progress” snapshots of our work. Read details here.

All latest news about the production are available at our official blog.

You can help us to make this animated short awesome than ever, by supporting us at our official page at Patreon:
[size=150]https://www.patreon.com/morevna[/size]

Your support is much appreciated.
Thank you!

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All my best for this important project for you, your team and the synfig community : production wise, test case wise, enhancement/debugging wise, and “demo reel” wise.

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Dear friends! Unfortunately, due to the major funding problems the release date is shifted for one month. Details…

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My name is Ernesto Bazzano (Bazza) and I’m an Argentinian artist. I’m making a short animated film called “4232”, using libre software with GNU/linux. That is software made and supported by communities of programmers and developers who care about freedom.
Among other software, I use:

GIMP, to clean the scanned images, coloring, image processing.
Synfig, to mount the animation frame by frame.
My own programs; Like the drawings of 4232 are hand made, I develop programs that allow to Synfig to incorporate real drawings. Like this, in addition to making my short film of animation, I generate programs that can help to others artits in their work.

The animation is a very complex activity thought to be made by a lot of people, in big studies and with big budget. I’m making applications, to speed up and make easier the whole animation processes. This way, it’s easier for an artist full of wills but with low budget, make his dreamed animation .

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Synopsis of the 4232

4232 is a story about a post-apocalyptic future. In a metropolis isolated by a big dome, the aristocracy has converted poor people into robots, undressing them of all humanity.
They are the robot-workers used for explotation of the last resources in the earth, wich is turning into a big barren desert.
Some people have escaped of this metropolis to shelter in small constructions out of the dome, surrounded by desert and pollution.
One day, the inhabitants of one of these shelters, find a robot in the desert, the number 4232. Unlike the other robots, 4232 preserves his consciousness and relates to them how he has escaped of the metropolis. So the people of the desert start to wonder why 4232 is diferent and see him like a hope for their own robotizated friends and families to recover the consciousness.

More details in 4232.cf

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Hi everyone,

the Boss 8) seems a bit busy and didn’t publish any official news about it in the front page (but the release schedule)…

Since yesterday, the new episode of Morevna has been published :smiley:
You will find it here
morevnaproject.org/anime/episode-3/
Thanks to all the contributors for their support!

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Hi!
Great work! All in all great animation, but it’s quit a style breach from the demo. I don’t recall seeing episode 1 and two? I liked the clean style of the demo a lot. Not a big fan of chibi, but that is personal. There seems to be a lack in consistency in the backgrounds: some backgrounds are marvelous, others seem sloppy and unfinished. Some effects, like the light effects are dazzling! The characters that are fully animated in Krita seem to be more detailed than some of their normal bone rigged Synfig counterparts. Sound and editing is top notch.
Greetz!

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I don’t get it… It’s the episode number three, but where are the first two? Is this Star Wars or something?

Well, as Russian guy myself I can fully understand the plot and dialogues and it’s… bad. I… I wanted to write a detailed critique but I am afraid to insult artists and developers. In short, this cartoon doesn’t have any “atmosphere”, there’s no soul in it. For example, humor is just incredibly bad (I even skipped some moments) and dialogues are poorly executed. Artists, who do the voices, speak it too willfully, yuck.

And the animation… In the demo we saw a cool vector morphing animation, the thing Synfig was made for, and it was pretty awesome. Here we see some lame bone animation that looks like a cheap flash cartoon. And this is supposed to promote Synfig? Good luck.

Overall… [size=85]so disappointed…[/size]

P.S. Please, don’t ban me!

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Hi, soon to be banned one :smiley:
Sadly most of the development time in the past went to the half finished bone and bone deformation tools and no time was spend on improving real (morphing) vector animation so that you are now getting more bone based animation in the project is logical, I guess. They also seem to go from “Synfig” project to “open source” project which makes the inclusion of Krita frame to frame animation also logical. Maybe time was a factor to abandon morphing or vertex animation, but I think most of the drawings were made in Krita and are not vector but pixel which makes morphing impossible. But I have to agree that I found the first demo I saw more … euh intresting, to say the least.
Greetz!

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Even more sadly, the implementation of bone system is still crummy. Like inability to change a shape after you’ve linked it to the skeleton. You can try to change it, but it will produce strange effects, especially if you’re trying to change tangents.

But there’s positive news - the new Cobra engine was tested during production and this means the new stable release is coming soon! I hope it’ll bring some stability improvements, because the current stable one likes to crash a lot on my Windows 10 machine.

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I agree. It seems they started to work on bone deformation even before the bone system in itself was stable. As it is now, you can not copy bones, reuse rigged characters and if you make a mistake during rigging you might as well start over cos it is a pain in the behind to simply delete a bone without getting major problems later on. Also in my experience it is almost impossible to rig content that has copies in it, and by that I don’t mean copies from another scene, because reusability in general as in having a library remains very painful in Synfig, but copies from within the same file for instance like hands or feet, without getting major rotation problems. Lets hope the new build will finally bring some speed and stability to the windows version.
Greetz!

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I do not think our friend KonstantinDmitriev, to ask your opinion on the episode, and not to criticize negatively.

The only thing you’ll get, is that it stops post news on the forum.

I have not seen it yet, but all I can say is that building a “cartoon” is long and difficult, I already did.

It takes the idea, history, and then put it on the stage, so I’ll just say, we show you what else you can do.

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Hi!
I have made 3 short 20 minute animated movies, dozens of animated commercials and I worked on a pilot episode or two in my time and although that does not make me an expert at all, it did make me realize that animation is very hard and long work for any tiny second that you want to show. Saying that the bone system still is not flawless is not criticism but merely a fact I encounter every day when I try to rig characters and saying that I like the vertex animation of the demo more than the bone animation of the new episode does not mean that the new episode is bad. Just because I don’t like the style does not mean that I don’t think they did a great job and I have said as much. I contribute to this forum, to the wiki and try to throw in a tutorial here and there and I also contributed money to the synfig program more then once. I think that gives me the right to throw in a bone of criticism every now and then.
Greetz!

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:laughing:

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I’ve seen the episode,
and to answer you directly “Svarov”, not “Synfig Studio” is not what you have seen in the episode.

You’ve seen the “Krita” program “Krita” drawings mostly
“Synfig Studio” made the animation of the images.

Dmitriev uses “Krita” to do the drawings, me I use “Inkscape” and I can tell you that the result is really different.

I use “Synfig Studio” animation, “Inkscape” for the creation of drawings, “Blender” to create 3D view, I also use “Gimp” to retouch images.

So I would say that to create a “good series animated”, it should choose the right program to “create these drawings”.

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Please synme,
you are far out of topic…
Our friends are quite experienced Synfigers and animators justifying their feedback with objective comments.
It seems you didn’t fully understand what they were expressing (please always read twice, at least :wink: ).
Konstantin is a big guy and I think he will be disappointed for so few :laughing:

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Hello everyone! Thanks to everyone for the feedback. Two months passed by since the release, I was able to get a little breath, dust is settling down and now it’s time to put some clarifications. :slight_smile:

BobSynfig, thank you for taking your time on dropping announcement here.

In fact, the Demo was a “demonstration of possibility”, not “demonstration fo the style”. We have ongoing experiments with the style, and let me assure you - they will continue. :slight_smile: (In this regard you might want to take a look at Morevna 3D). You have a great opportunity to watch and follow the our style investigations and its evolution. Just sit back and enjoy the show!

We are producing episodes inconsequently.

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Ok, now for unhappy ones. Illustrated. :slight_smile:

Well, you did skipped some moments? How can you judge and pretend for consistency then? :slight_smile:

214 YouTube users are not agree with you. Seriously. prooflink

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Morevna Episode 3 is available here and here. In 2 months it is gained ~12k views on YouTube. That’s 6k views per month.

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Morevna Demo is available here and here. For 4 years (47 months, to be exact) it is gained ~90k views. That’s less than 2k views per month.

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By this moment Morevna Episode 3 gained (214 + 89)=303 upvotes and (10 + 7)=17 downvotes.
Satisfaction rate is 303/(303+17)*100% = 94,7%

Morevna Demo gained (410 + 66) = 476 upvotes and (41 + 14) = 55 downvotes.
Satisfaction rate is 476/(476 + 55)*100% = 89,6%

Conclusion: Episode 3 is performing better than the demo.

As we used to say in Russia - “Statistic is stubborn thing”. :slight_smile:

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This is not correct. The bone system was improved with consideration of vector tools - youtube.com/watch?v=NbI6TeAHbgs

EDIT: Also, let me mention, that with the new Cobra engine vector is faster now.

This is also not correct. It is possible change vertices after you linked to skeleton. See the same video at 7:50 - youtu.be/NbI6TeAHbgs?t=7m50s

About the “strange effects” my only guess is that you need to understand that editing shape gives different results depending if Animation Mode is on or off.

If you examine source files of Episode 3, you will notice that in many shots (i.e. shot 64) we are combining bitmap images with vector elements. There are no problems with tangents there.

The situation is worse, than you think.

Initially I was expecting to get support from Synfig community. Unfortunately, this didn’t worked. So, I was forced to delay the release of Episode 3 and invested my personal funds to pay our hired developer for all necessary developments. That way we’ve got tons of bug fixed and got lipsync features by integrating Synfig with Papagayo. But as result I’ve got a major debt and that means I won’t be able to invest in development in the nearest time. The sales of Synfig Training Course are slowly covering the debt for me, but this is a long process.

That means you shouldn’t expect any major development/fixes in the nearest time (well, expect the big memory usage fix). Most likely we will just release current dev version as it is. At the end, it is proven as usable in Morevna production.

Yes, I am absolutely agree and understand you and appreciate your support. The mentioned bugs are very frustrating and annoying. Unfortunately, due to the state of things (described above) I cannot help here now.

What you can do in this situation:

I am sure our (ex)hired developer Ivan Mahonin (the one who was working on Synfig for last 3 years) will be happy to fix the issue for you.

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Thank you for the kind words and support, Synme. :slight_smile:

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Mr Dmitriev

Thank You for take this project and upgrade it, even at your expense.

I haven’t seen yet your animation. It’s hard to choose in which subject use my time.

I’d wish it could be a better way to maintain Synfig. How Inkscape is maintained? Or Gimp? Or Blender?. Let me just leave here those questions.

Best wishes to all.