Using Synfig for a week

Hi, politely introducing myself :slight_smile:
I’m a middle-aged man from Spain.

I like to make occasional animations, as a greeting for Crhistmas and the like. I used previously CreaToon under windows (4shared.com/video/GSkjb7SP/f … furl=d1url

Since then, I found rather difficult to choose a replacement for CreaToon. So, my further “greeting cards” have been stopmotion based.

Now I’ve been trying out synfig this month (along with pencil, which isn’t quite what I need), and I’m fairly impressed so far. It gives you control over every parameter (which is good but has its counterpart: you have to care of everything). Only missing the fake-3D effect I achieved by setting layers in depth (z-axis) and moving the “camera”. And perhaps some more easy way of reusing animations. That’s all. In general, an awesome program.

Thank you very much for the efforts of the team. Looking forward to contribute with a donation.

JC


Welcome to the Synfig community jc cheloven!
Glad you like Synfig.

You can actually get a fake-3D effect in Synfig as well. have a look at this tutorial: http://wiki.synfig.org/wiki/Multiplane_Camera

Your 4shared link requires registration at the site so I haven’t watched it. :frowning:

Welcome jc cheloven! welcome to the forums.
I hope to see you in Libre Graphics Meeting Spain 2013! :wink:
-G

@rylleman: Thank you for the tutorial. Nice to see the possibility of “fake-3D” in synfig.
As for the link: sorry about the 4shared requirement of registration; I think it wasn’t required before. Let’s try with UbuntuOne: ubuntuone.com/3yCoFiJ5xYC245Ry2ZhjIN
I would be really interested in hearing a quick opinion from someone proficient with Synfig on how feasible/easy would be to do something like that with it.
–> Note: I’m inclined by now to say that the strong point of synfig is morphing, rather than cut-out. I plan to use it principally for morphing then. But I’d love to check my first, biased, impressions against someone else’s.

@Genete: Thanks for the suggestion, I see here libregraphicsmeeting.org/2012/20 … and-venue/ it’s to be held in Madrid, in april 2013. May be a nice occasion for a trip, though! Hope to meet you there :wink:

JC

Personally I think that both the rotate layer and being able able to animate Z-depth changes to allow you to do things like make one leg temporarily go behind another makes Synfig Studio better than Flash for cut-out animation, but I’m biased :laughing:

I’d recommend having a look at the Morevna Project’s stickman template - if you try and figure how it actually works it should give you some idea of what you can do with Synfig Studio.

Have a look here - start from the bottom and work up!

morevnaproject.org/tag/stickman/

I’m not sure how often I will come here for help. But I joined incase. Currently reading the wiki and trying to get use to synfig. I’d actually tried it out a long time ago but I’d always had windows and it either crashed for me or was extremely slow but now I’m dual booting linux and it works great so I really hope I can make what I have had planned for so long!

www.chessrivals.net