( 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.

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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!

As a followup to the previous fanart post, I have decided to go for a little experiment and suggested a test task for Anastasia. I sketched a character pose draft like I usually do when we work with Nikolai and then she made a final artwork out of that. Here’s how it turned out: 

Just for reference, here’s how the sketch provided by me looked like: 

Good news happened last week!

First of all, the campaign to fund my travel for Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM) have reached its goal! That means I will be able to attend the event, do the workshop there and collaborate on Synfig code! Yay! My deep thanks to all contributors for their support. It’s realy awesome to see such a commitment from the community and it’s another sign that things are getting serious around Synfig. ^__^

It’s most likely my workshop will be on April 10 afternoon (14:30), Wednesday (official program is expected to be announced in a few hours). Besides the main LGM schedule, the April 14 is planned for off-program meetings and hacksessions. I will arrive to Madrid on afternoon of April 9th and leave on early morning of April 16th. I hope we will have enough time to collaborate.

Also, I’ve got a response on my offer to organize additional workshops on my way to Madrid. As result, there will be an additional workshop in St. Petersburg (Russia). It is planned on April 4th and chances that we will have one more on April 5th. Details to be announced soon. EDIT: Details are announced now – http://spospb.blogspot.ru/2013/03/synfig-studio.html.

We have received a gallery of fanart images made by Anastasia Majzhegisheva. The author’s age is 14 years old (!) and she brings her own vision of Morevna.

Hey, it’s been a long time! Let me share some quick news with you.

If you remember, in November I have planned  a lot of stuff to be done by February. Unfortunately, none of the outlined tasks are completed by the moment. That means we are not ready to launch the new episode of Morevna now and this initiative will be postponed for a few months.

But that doesn’t mean we were doing nothing on that period. In fact, our efforts gone into unexpected direction. We’ve been put into the situation that forced us to concetrate on developing the technology which allows to produce simple character animation in the very short time. This development resulted in the special character template for Synfig. It is based on the stickman template, but introduces such featureas as IK emulation, library of reusable elements and mimic controls. In the video below you can see it in action.

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