Shapes not appearing?

i’m new to synfig and animation altogether, so my question might be simple to some people.

I downloaded it yesterday and as soon as I saw it I realized it was much more complicated than I expected (I’m used to using Paint and Moviemaker). So I started playing with it. I had trouble with pretty much everything and was confused by all the layers. After a few hours I had only managed to successfully create a black background.

Later on I noticed that all the shapes I tried to add didn’t appear on the canvas. I tried turning certain layers on and off but that didn’t change anything. Also when I click on the layer with the shape, all of those little “dots” show up (meaning I can move the shape, angle it etc…) but I still can’t actually see it.

Is it not working or is a program like this just too complicated for a beginner? thanks… ._.

:mrgreen:

Did you read and do the beginners tutorials? wiki.synfig.org/wiki/Category:Tutorials_Basic

Please check that the default blend method in the Toolbox defaults is nothing but ‘By Layer Default’.
Also check that the default opacity is not set to 0.0.
-G

As wrote Genete, to do the beginner tutorials are imperative if you want to work (and not die trying :laughing: ) with Synfig.

The learning curve of Synfig is very hard. Synfig could seem not very intuitive (it is not) but it has a very powerful options to animating.