The Ubuntu Massachusets Local Community Team is making an ambitious effort to bring anime fans to the world of Open Source at the  Anime Boston 2010 convention. At their booth in the dealers’ room they plan to hand out Ubuntu LiveCDs and copies of the Ubunchu Manga, do some cool demonstrations, perform live installations and… whoa! They’re going to promote the Morevna Project and its production tools!

From my personal experience (as part of both Linux and anime communities) I can tell that for some strange reason anime fans have a natural aptitude towards Open Source and vice versa. It’s a good step to make them closer and this event may have a great impact on projects like Morevna, because the more anime fans will use Open Source tools – the more prospective contributors we have around. ^__^

The event is entirely community funded and they need your support. Please visit the event homepage for details.

It’s been a long time since Synfig Studio 0.62.00 came out. But because of our absence this significant event didn’t get mentioned here. It’s time to “redress an injustice”. We’re on 0.62.00 now. The packages page is updated.

Major reasons to upgrade:

• Hey, it’s release!

Download ogg-video: slowmo.ogv.

You can examine animation sources here. Animation have complex structure and splitted into parts – each character in separate file. All parts have normal timing and composed together in the 20-3.sif file (you see it in the first part of the video). SlowMo effect is applied in 20.sif file by importing 20-3.sif into it and changing the TimeOffset property.

Morevna Project is proudly presents an update of Stickman Template. Stickman Template is used for character animation. It tends to simplify setup when you want to make animation in cutout technique or something more complex.

Changes:

• New version includes dummy regions to quickly navigate through stickman structure. Just click on any gray region and start creating your graphics on top of it.
• Additional exported values (stickman-amount/show-fillers) allows you to control stickman appearance.
• General template  structure was improved – it is easy to change order of stickman’s parts now.

Also notice the license change – it’s CC Zero now! Enjoy!

Download Stickman Template

Major reasons to upgrade:

• Reverse manipulation for scale convert type
• Improved UI
• Keyframes are now displayed in Curves panel
• Keyfames are now draggable
• Tablet settings are remembered
• CPH monitor to collect statistics about crashes

More info:

A long time the only way to change keyframe position was only through editing Keyframes panel. In this version keyframes are displayed on the timeline and (yes!) you can drag them with mouse. You can also shift a bunch of keyframes by dragging with ALT key pressed.

New panel on top of the canvas window shows and allows to change display mode for a canvas. For example, it’s very handy to see which ducks types you have enabled at the moment.

Also, there is a good improvement that allows to manipulate ducks converted to “Scale” type. This improves workflow very much for such techniques like “Sewing Blines”. This improvement is one step to the “Smart tangents linking” feature.

Sometimes there are nasty changes in Synfig code happen and that causes overall Synfig instability. To track those changes we now have a tool called CPH monitor. It collects information about Synfig crashes and should give us necessary statistics about its overall stability. Of course this statistics is very approximated and depend on user activity type.

I think that update deserves a screenshot:

Click to enlarge.

P.S. By the way, CPH is stands for “crash per hour”. ^_^

• for RPM-based distributions (Fedora, Red Hat, Mandriva, etc.):
  • 32bit: pencil-0.4.4b-54.morevna.1.i386.rpm
  • 64bit: pencil-0.4.4b-54.morevna.1.x86_64.rpm
• for Debian-based distributions (Debian, Ubuntu, etc.):
  • 32bit: pencil_0.4.4b-54.morevna.1_i386.deb
  • 64bit: pencil_0.4.4b-54.morevna.1_amd64.deb

NOTE: You need Qt >= 4.3.4 installed to run Pencil.

You may notice decreasing of post count here lately. No, we’re not dead – just busy working on the project! Lots of news and unfortunately completely no time to write about.

Last month with the help of invited artist Nikolay Mamashev we have researched, tested and approved character animation techniques in Synfig. Now we can say with confidence – character animation in Synfig is possible.

Nothing new, eh? Well, yes, we knew that before, we even knew the approaches HOW it could be done, but… the best thing that we have proofed it on the practice for ourselves!

So at this moment we can confidently say that it is possible to do character animation of ANY level of complexity with Synfig. Even with its current state (did I mentioned that Synfig have no bones support yet?) ~_~. I’m feeling absolutely amazing, I hope find a time to write more on this later.

For those who want to cherry-pick latest changes before I comment them – watch the “Recent changes” page on the wiki! CYA, viva Synfig!

It was a really good year. Many things happened. Amazing things. Yes, the project is far from completion… but you still here, our dear reader, and that means what your hope for us is not lost. Thank you for believing in us, thank you for your great support. We’re moving. But before we go further, let’s take a look back to see what’s already behind.

Download Ogg/Theora video: demo-animatic.ogv (20Mb).

That’s it. Happy Birthday, morevnaproject.org! Let’s keep moving.