I’ve successfully added keyframes and the resulting animations of the images works perfectly.
A problem arises when I add a new object after I’ve completely added waypoints for the initial objects.
Let’s term them Object O and Object N.
I’ll completely animate the original object “O”.
When I try to animate the new object “N” I’ll enter say keyframe #10 and change some parameter of the object N.
Instead of a single set of way points three sets appear.
The first is on keyframe #10 with the correct settings.
But on the left(#9) and right (#11) of it are two other sets of way points that are created that contradict my changes, that is they duplicate the original state of the object.
So instead of a smooth transition from keyframe #1 to #10 nothing happens until keyframe #10 is reached then there is a single keyframe of the new settings, and it switches back to the initial settings from keyframe #1 once keyframe #11 is reached.
This requires that I laboriously remove these “wingmen”.
It only occurs when I add a new object after I’ve created all keyframes for the previous object.
Is there something I am doing wrong?
Keyframes store the state of the entire animation at their frame, so when you add a knew object to the scene after declaring a whole set of keyframes already, every keyframe saves the state of this object.
Then when you modify the object at one keyframe, the surrounding keyframes make sure it retains the stored state.
To avoid creating these “wingmen” you can just temporily turn off the keyframes that you don’t want to influence your animation.
Thank you for that. I suspected something automatic was going on, but wanted to check that I wasn’t doing something erroneous. So, I tried turning off keyframes except for one and it worked. But I have 48 key frames* in my animation so turning them all off manually is also quite the pain (I deselected the checkboxes one at a time).
This would lead me to believe that I should have all the objects on the canvas before I start the animation process for most efficient technique?
In my first animation I used four keyframes to animate a character pumping a bike pump and then replicated those four keyframes 12 times for my base animation.
If you need to animate different objects there is also the possibility to combine existing animations into a new big one. (So you can have a different set of keyframes for each object)
Let’s say in one file you have the animation of a ball rolling and in another file the animation of a child running, you could import both animations, so that the child is running after the ball.
Also for looped animation there is special layer called ‘Time Loop’, with that you don’t have to duplicate keyframes to make the animation repeat.
Hi, I sent you a reply through gmail, but it wasn’t deliverable. Thank you again for your help. Got things working nicely now. Starting to get my head around how synfig works (starting Blender next!!!)
Here are the rough animations I’ve created for my educational video
All I need to do is figure out how to make the hose swing on a natural curve.
But I’m pretty happy with my first animations