Hi, i’ve made lot’s of draws with Synfig, and i have to admit that i’m taking a great apretiation for Synfig Studio, i find it more fast and reliable than the regular Scalable vector graphics editors, Inkscape is the king on the field but still i’m using more Synfig with fast and simple tasks, today i made a Jigglypuff XD, based on a sketch i also made in GIMP:
but perhaps i went too fancy with the lighting effects and i got some problems with lighting, never the less i think is a good experiment:
It’s incomplete and i’ll be fixing those lighting problems, but i feel like i need to do something else before ruin this project.
oh, btw, i opened a topic for drawings made in synfig, i find myself stuck trying to make long animations… well… at least 5 seconds long, so i’m using Synfig as a drawing tool to learn as much functions as i can, this while i find inspiration for animations
It is so cute!!! I like the eye composition a lot!. Regarding to shadow/shades I would avoid the shade or the bevel layer and go for a classic soft region multiplied or a curve gradient for shaded parts and spots lights for the shines. Its left arm shading is suffering some not continuity on the shading and that breaks the good looking of the body.
About animation: Break the process into: animatic of main poses (hand or gimp drawn) and after that tracing of poses and timing in Synfig. Remember: exaggeration, overlapping actions, anticipation, arcs actions…
ah yeah, as you can see i like soft shading because gives a better illusion of deep of lighting, you can see it on my signature (or it’s full version here http://hienhen.deviantart.com/art/Robo-Lou-144986835) i really like the combination of soft colors and dramatic shadows
Also while Shading Layer is one of the most useful layers along with warp and rotate, ‘Bevel’ layer have prove to be useless, or not as useful as one can think, the main problem is that it works as expected, i hardly find excuses for use it in place of a custom shape. I also think that the shading layer could have a ‘zoom’ option to increase it size or something like that, because i’ve found myself increasing it amount by 2 for have an extended version of the shadow, aaaalso an extra option to create 'Blines and ‘Regions’ inside an Encapsulated layer from the start at the creation of layers in tracing tools (pen, cicrle, square, polies and draw) would save some clicks and put some more order to the things.
Ahhouuu, the pain, i can’t write a plot, not that i’m bad animating, my problem is that i don’t have the creativity for writing a history, nor any idea from where to start, you might remember i asked for your help unifying a hand with it’s arm and the same for the feets, well, my cast and actors are complete, but i have no idea what to do with them!, i ‘want to make an animation, and i want an animation with those characters’ but that is all what it comes to my mind, almost any idea i have is a cheap copy from another animation or history already made. =(
For me it’s like this: Many very nice effects, characters, environments and even short story parts come to my mind…but I don’t have a story to put them in. But that’s maybe because I have never really worked on a full story (making funny films doesn’t require good storys).
I think using a rough and simple plot and building upon it by making it more non-linear, adding funny parts, let your characters change the process of the story or linking it with a second plot might be good to start.
