Today is the second birthday of morevnaproject.org. Looking back at the past year, I can tell that it was a very hard year for the project.
I haven’t wrote much on this blog last year, but for me it brought a lot of experience and was full of amazing discoveries. I met outstanding creative people, here I want to name two of them who just strike me with their talent and passion to work on the project – Nikolay Mamashev (I miss your helping hand!) and Terry Hancock (your work on screenplay is invaluable and your ideas are always outstanding!). The way you both understanding this project is always amazed me, I’m proud that I know you, guys!
Also I would like to thank everyone who keeps watching our progress, send me their feedback and supports me – thank you for being here all that time. Show is going on, Happy Birthday, morevnaproject.org!
I am happy to announce that we have just completed the first draft of our screenplay translation. Of course there’s still a lot of work on dialog, format, and style, but at least it’s already readable for English-speaking audiences. For those who are not afraid of spoilers or want to join further translation efforts, the full text of the screenplay translation is available here.
I want to say a big thanks to all contributors and especially to Terry Hancock aka Digitante who has been working on the translation with great dedication and has made it progress this far.
As you remember, Morevna Project was going to be promoted at Anime Boston 2010 by Ubuntu Massachusets Local Community Team. We have decided not to go with the usual demo snapshot and prepared a special video with production cuts. Now event is over and we are happy to share this video with you.
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.
As some of you may know, four months ago Morevna Project was suspended because of personal issues. Now I’m happy to inform everyone that we are back on track. Stay tuned! Punk not dead! Etc, etc…
Some time ago we have described TimeControl technique which allows to fine-tune animation timing without quality loss, and now we have applied that technique to shot 20 to get SlowMo effect.
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!
Synfig Studio packages have been updated. Please grab them from the packages page.
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”. ^_^
Today is the second birthday of morevnaproject.org. Looking back at the past year, I can tell that it was a very hard year for the project.
