[Ah got it working the way I want, very straightforward]
Hi all,
Really enjoyed getting synfig up and running.
I’m trying to do a super simple animation of a molecule which I was successfully able to import as svg after some adjustment. This is retinaldehyde, a central molecule in color vision. The molecule “flips” along one of the bonds, shown in this image:
and I wanted to create a simple animation of it but having trouble figuring out the overall way to achieve this in synfig (I would have just set up some parent-child links and adjusted the origin of rotation in blender). Can anyone give me a hint as to how do I start in synfig? Is the “right” way to do this with bones or move each bond individually?
I’ve attached the file for reference.
EDIT: I should say that most of the molecule should stay fixed while the “flip” happens at the tail…can I invert and scale across an arbitrary axis? Or should I manually key each line?
retinalcistrans.sifz (4.19 KB)
Hi!
Would not use bones for that. Just group the parts that you want to animate and use the group transformation widget.
Made a very quick and rudimentary example using your scene.
Greetz!
retinalcistrans_work.sifz (5.32 KB)
Exactly the help I needed.
Thanks so much!
Ok another question that I’ve trying to find the answer to.
To mimc the effect of rotating in 3d, I can put all the lines that will move in a specific group (I did this by cutting/pasting…is this right?) and then move the origin the “root” of the chain of atoms that will rotate (again easy, is there a smart way to “snap” the origin to a specific vertex or do I have to do it visually?).
Now "vertical scale adjustment isn’t quite right since the bond (line) that the chain is rotating about is oriented at about 60 deg. darkspace65’s helpful example uses the vertical scale but I need to scale along an oriented line. I would like to rotate the origin without moving so that I “vertical scale” along an oriented line but it seems I can’t rotate my transformation widget without rotating my group.
Is there an obvious way to scale along an arbitrary orientation that I am missing? I am looking at rotate and scale layers and I don’t think they offer a solution.
EDIT: Added crude representation of earlier figure to explain a bit better. Essentially I want to rotate the right side of the chain around the bond with the crude red arrow around it. Vertical scaling isn’t quite right, it needs to invert across the orientation of the bond.
