Here’s another fanart image from Anastasia Majzhegisheva.

By the way, today is the fifth anniversary of morevnaproject.org. Happy Birthday! ^__^

( читать по-русски | Russian translation )

Suddenly I’ve got a letter from Shuttleworth Foundation:

CONGRATULATIONS!

You have been nominated by Jonas Öberg to receive a Shuttleworth Foundation Flash Grant to work on your projects. … We tasked our Fellows to seek out and nominate an impressive change agent, who may not be able to concentrate on their brilliant idea yet. This grant is for the sum of $5,000 and will be awarded to you personally to bring that idea forward.

I was really shocked about this and honestly I would think it’s someone’s joke, if it would not mention name of Jonas Öberg, who I’m happy to know personally. In any case, the money are here now and I’m enormously thankful to Shuttleworth Foundation for such an amazing act of trust and of course to Jonas Öberg for recommending me.

What does it mean. It means that at least the next half of the year I won’t need to waste my efforts on doing commercial jobs to make my living. Instead I can use all my time to concentrate on my animation-related open-source activities. Consequences will follow.

Read the rest of this entry »

We are happy to receive another fanart image, this time from Carlos “Lobo” Zamora. He is also published a post describing the process of working on this image – worth to take a look!

Morevna Fanart by Carlos “Lobo” Zamora

( читать по-русски | Russian translation )

It’s ten days passed by since the new version of Synfig Studio got officially released but I guess it’s never too late to announce it here. ^__^

Synfig Studio 0.64.0 splash screen by Nikolai Mamashev

This release includes the brand-new cairo rendering engine, as well as our improvements – simple plugins system and disabled keyframes. That’s it – the features developed during the work on Morevna Project Demo now officially included into Synfig and this is a significant milestone for us, of course.

Download Synfig Studio 0.64.0

And yes, Synfig isn’t crashing anymore when you try to disable keyframes. ~_^ The new version also includes the stickman template, available as a plugin called “Simple Skeleton”. That means the stickman is now a part of Synfig Studio and will be updated with its development. Though, we do not exclude possibility of publishing more alternative versions of stickman, but they will be provided as Synfig plugins from now.

Read the complete list of new features

( читать по-русски | Russian translation )

As many of you know, this April I was happy to attend the Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM) event in Madrid - the largest conference for free software graphics application users and developers. Much thanks to all community members who made this trip possible!

It took some time for me to analyze the results and have everything settled in my mind. So, today I would like to present a personal report about this event.

Read the rest of this entry »

Here are some fanart images we received from Ksenija Kuzjaeva:

Morevna

Ivan

Koschei

Here are quite unexpected and extremely rough drafts of the main antagonist in Morevna’s story.

Hola! We understand that the published character template is pretty much unuseful without a tutorial. So, here I’m publishing a screencast recorded from my workshop at LGM.

You can download the full tutorial in ogg-theora format here: http://archive.org/details/SynfigCharacterTemplateTutorial

Enjoy!

In addition to the basic character template released yesterday, we are publishing another one – it’s Sita from the “Sita Sings the Blues” animated movie by Nina Paley.

Click here to download full package with both characters

The character is traced and rigged by Nikolay Mamashev.

License: CC-Zero 1.0

Enjoy!

As it was promised, today we’re releasing all files for our character template. That’s it – we’re publishing the basic charater for you to play with and reuse. Under the terms of CC-Zero 1.0 license, of course.

Click here to download the latest version

Also, there is a github repository for those who love to clone, fetch and fork. ^__^

To use the template you will need the latest versions of Synfig Studio and Papagayo, which we have updated as well. Please get them at the software page.

But there’s not all. During the last period we worked hard testing the template and end up with more than one character. So we decided to publish them all. That means instead of single sample character you will get a library of characters. Expect more characters to be added in just a few hours.

Workshop

Also, if you remember, today is the day of my workshop at LGM, where I will be explaining how to use this template. Everyone who is planning to participate in the workshop, please working files here.

Please don’t forget to install the latest versions of Synfig Studio and Papagayo (from the software page).

For the people who cannot attend the workshop, I’ll try to record the screencast, combine with the video and publish it online. That surely take some time, but let’s hope that will work out finally.

That’s it, stay tuned!