Origin unwanted translocation, exporting parameters and time loop questions from a Newbie

This is my video, I’m at work now so no access to the synfig file, but I can upload it if needed.

youtu.be/l_y6TKesnik

Hi guys,

Like I have said before, I’m a newbie and just doing this for fun. But if I can help someone along the lines with disease processes, then brilliant.

This is only a segment of the animation I’m doing. It’s been a bit of a learning curve process. At the beggining I didn’t understand waypoints and keyframes (I thought I did, but I didn’t). So for the first seconds of the view, I was in fact saving a keyframe after a keyframe. This made the whole animation much more difficult to edit, because keyframes will save EVERYTHING as it is. With waypoints I can change little things as I go.

In short, a brilliant program that I’m thoroughly enjoying and I’m sure I’m only scratching the surface of.

Now, the problems I’ve faced.

1.- You’ll see that I don’t draw in Synfig, everything in drawn in GIMP, then imported as a .png image. I find GIMP much more versatile to draw and I don’t really want to change this if I can avoid it.
The origin of my items change A LOT sometimes. I…e If I need to move a bit of an animation, the origin (green dot) sometimes appears miles away from the object I want to move. Why is this? This makes ‘linking’ objects much harder. You’ll see that the biscuits, will be come ‘nutrients’ eventually in the video, this is because I managed to link the biscuit to the nutrient, and make the biscuits dissapear and the nutrients appear. I was lucky that time, but when other times I try to link things, is almost impossible.

2.- The above problem extends itself to exporting parameters. I.e. Whenever I’ve tried to use this function with the green dot, the origin of the item had changed to somewhere else, sometimes even the shape of it?!

3.- I know you can duplicate keyframes, that’s fine. But what I want to do is to duplicate a segment of the animation without using time loop. I.e. Can I just copy and paste a 50 frames if I chose to? Or is timeloop the only way to do this?

4.- Finally, with timeloop, I understand the function but? How can I make the end of a time loop to look like the beggining so there isn’t a ‘break’ everytime that the loop commences?

5.- Did you see the heart beat? When I used the time loop sometimes the two beats were happening at the same time. Why would that be?

I’m sorry for making it that long, but I guess I’ve been going without asking questions for too long.

By the way, I used Avidemuxx for the video (the colours went wrong, I know, but I know how to fix it, it isn’t a big deal) and my platform is Windows 8 :-/

Thank you in advance if you manage to give me any answers ;-D

In response to my own question (q4), I think I found how to fix it after reading through the forums. :smiley:

If I want to make a loop from frames A to B: I can add a waypoint at the frame B+1 that is exactly the same as A, Synfig will make sure B is the necessary frame before A without a break. Fantastic! I just needed to work my head around it.

Nice video! I’m going to list how I accomplish the things you’re asking about, but others may have better methods.

  1. origin point - I’ve just made this a part of my workflow. Any time I import an image, create a new shape, etc., I make sure the origin is where I want it before doing anything else. For most objects, you can do this by selecting all of the vertices (Ctrl-A) and placing them where you want in relation to the origin. After that, if you just need to move the object, only use the origin. This should also solve your problem #2, if I understand it correctly.

Another option: the development builds let you move the origin using the group transformation widget. Just hold shift (space in older snapshots) while moving the origin dot.

  1. re-using animation segments - this is how I usually do it:
  • put all of the objects you’re re-using into a group layer
  • select the new group layer
  • select all of the Canvas waypoints in the part you want to repeat (Ctrl-click for multiple)
  • hold shift and drag the waypoints to the frames you want to use them in.
  1. smooth timeloops - one way is to duplicate the beginning keyframe, one frame after the end frame of your loop. You may need to mess with interpolation to make sure it matches at both ends.

  2. not sure about this one…

Ah, looks like you found one answer yourself while I was typing – good work. :slight_smile:

Thank you d_g_ !

I didn’t know the Crtl+A trick. It was a bit tricky to start with, because I group my .png images as soon as they’re imported. For some reason, I don’t have origin dots in the imported layer, but I do have it in the grouped ones.
So to move the origin in relation to the .png, I hit Crtl+A while selecting the two vertices of the imported .png image, then I can move the layer in relation to the group layer origin. It’s a little difficult and not too intuitive because you can’t see the origin of the grouped layer while you’re moving the .png image. I hope this make sense. Anyway, It sort of work! Not sure how it would work with ‘linking’ and ‘exporting’ but I will experiment when I get the time.

The loop problem is sorted as you already know.

for some reason “Image Layer” deosn’t have origin paramerter … maybe could be an enhancement request (waiting that if have putted some words in the wiki )

Exporting, linking “origin parameter” of a group layer old an image layer is quite normal is this actual situation.

In recent dev. builds images is automatically placed inside (Switch) Groups when importing.

Well, thank you guys for explaining the issues. :smiley:
Still hadn’t had the chance to use the ‘exporting’ and ‘link’ features but I suppose they’ll be easy to handle them now.

I continue to develop my animation, will let you know when more unsolved problems arrive.

Fran