Workflow test (+Gamma issue and feature request)

Artwork Work in progress
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Hi
Long time since I didn’t have time to use Synfig; So I’ve made a little workflow test before to do something more serious, to find out eventual issues first.

Screenshot

Render

So first, most important issue for me now is color gamma: I’ve been confronted with the issue that with default settings, color selector values are very special/different from every other software.
For instance, I use -and even abuse- the desktop color picker on KDE, or gcolor2 on gnome, to select colors from any source, even previous colors from synfig canvas, and paste them where needed using html color code, which is quite fast workflow. But then with Synfig default settings pasted color values are wrong, so I’ve searched and found out that I had to both deselect “linear color correction” and set gamma to 1 to get good result.
So far so good, until I export: damn, export is at original gamma 2.2! So, with hope, I look at CLI parameters to see if it could save me, find there the wanted “-g” option, but that leads to warning “: Gamma argument is currently ignored” (with the corresponding bug report HERE).
That’s the biggest issue I have for now, please tell me if there is a solution, and/or if it can be fixed when possible…

Another thing I want to report, but this time it’s a feature request (so it can wait, even more as I’ve a workaround for it… )
As you can notice, I’ve managed to get a global silhouette outline on the character, but with a big trick - it’s made of 9 layers (8 shadow layers and 1 oversampling layer)-, when it would be so easy and more flexible to do it with only one of a layer type meant for this.
It should, like the shadow layer, get the alpha mask of associated layers, fill it with a color, but with an additional “grow” or “extend” parameter, which value define outline thickness, like the grow/shrink selection menu entries in Gimp for instance. So please either create a new layer type like this, or just add the “grow” parameter to shadow layer (if it doesn’t break compatibility I’d be fine with that)

That’s all for now, I hope this report is useful…
More to come soon! ;.)

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Hi Animtim!
regarding to gamma issue it is one annoying hardcored setup that I would like to fix it too. I did some quick trials to fix it but then I found that there were many places were the gamma is used by default set on 2.2. This is definetively one issue to be fixed.

About Silhouette layer (can we call it like that?) I don’t know for sure if it can be done with the current feather code. One silhouette is created based on one expansion of the shapes. Shapes are in fact a polygon with a lof of sides so the expansion is made of the paralell polygon placed a thickness perpendicular to the shape itself. Notice that the silhouette would look wrong if the thinkness is so high.
At the current state of art, the shape based layers are inherited from the Shape Layer class which is responsible of render the smooth polygon. (all shape based layers share the feather parameter)
It would be possible to expand one single polygon one thickness away by telling it to the Shape layer. This is the way that the current feather is done.
The problem comes when there are multiple layers involved. That silhouette layer would need to collect the expanded polygons of the context layers and render them all together below the current context.
I think that it is not impossible but needs some further thinking.
Lately I’ve been workin with the Outline grow feature that has helped me to understand the canvas - context language, so maybe (maybe) it can be achieved.

Great feature request!
And great character design!
-G

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Thank you Genete for your answer;
Good to know you’ve started hunting the gamma issue, I hope it won’t take too long to get rid of it.

And I’m glad you like the silhouette layer idea, I understand roughly your explanation and why it may not be so easy. I’ll think further about it and let you know if I have some ideas, I’m sure we’ll can find-out how to do it :wink: