Questions about a simple path animation

Hello, I’m new to Synfig and I need some help with a very little animation. I’ll attach to this post the file I created. It’s a little circle that smoothly moves across the screen following a quaterfoil path. I have three wishes:

  1. make the circle speed homogeneous (in the final segment the circle slows down and I can’t understand why)
  2. merge the start and end point of the path so that it’s a true loop and with tangents (I managed to merge the points but the resulting point has not tangents)
  3. create a second version of the animation where the above loop is not present, while the circle goes from the start point to the end point and then back to the start point.

How should I proceed?
Thank you very much for your help.

P.S.: English is not my native language, please forgive me any related mistake.
quaterfoil.sifz (2.33 KB)

Hi falco,

The animation slows down because default interpolation for waypoints is ‘Clamped’. And if you want values to change linearly over time you have to convert waypoints to ‘linear’ type. To do this, go to File -> Panels -> Timetrack, then select ‘Circle’ layer and you’ll see two waypoints, right click on them -> Convert -> Linear.

Interpolation is a little confusing, so here is the link to the wiki: wiki.synfig.org/wiki/Waypoint#Interpolation

The second and third item I didn’t quite get… Well, I guess it’s cuz my English is not native too, but for the loops you can use ‘Time loop’ layer. Wiki again: wiki.synfig.org/wiki/Time_Loop_Layer

I attached your original file with above corrections, hope it’ll help.
To see how ‘time loop’ works, just set the ‘End time’ in the preview window to 1 minute.
quaterfoil.sifz (2.47 KB)