Would Synfig be useful for animating maps?

General Synfig general discussion
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I’m interested in doing a video series in part by animating battlefields to illustrate troop movements and such. I’m drawing inspiration from the American Battlefield Trust’s Animated Map Series and from Montemayor’s series of videos as well. I don’t anticipate getting on ABT’s level of production quality, but I think with some help I can make videos similar to Montemayor’s.

I should clarify that most of the videos I see online regarding map animations have more to do with illustrating someone traveling from point A to point B, while I’m looking more for animating moving pieces on a map backdrop.

Would Synfig be a good program for this? It seems like this is a pretty simple software program and the animations I’m hoping to make are pretty simple as well.

Thanks all.

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Hi, welcome here and thank you for your interest in Synfig :slight_smile:
Yes, you could use Synfig for such taks.
You can import bitmap in layers (PNG, JPG…) for the maps and use vector layers for moving parts and texts.
The effects of camera will be harder to manage but will be ok once you will have understood hierarchy of groups of layers :wink:

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Great! I’m not too concerned about camera angles at this point but I might look into it in the future. Thanks for your feedback.

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