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!

So, we have reached our first milestone by releasing the Demo. Though, it’s not time to relax -  there are still a lot of odds and ends to finish before we can proceed with the production of the next episode. Here I’m going to outline our main priorities for the next two months.

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( читать по-русски | Russian translation )

OK, we’re one step from finishing “Vectorization and Tweening” stage. There are just two shots pending for my review and a few soldiers to vectorize, which in fact are background characters. Be sure – we’re squeezing most of our free time to get this stage finished sooner.

Vectorization and Tweening status (10.09.2012)

The most of vectorization work last week is done by Nikolay. My work is merging keyframes together and tweening. At the same time I already have started some work on backgrounds. This is necessary to prepare the ground for Nikolay, so he can proceed to this task immediately as soon as vectorization stage will be done. The good thing  is that comparing to previous stage we don’t need to invent anything here. The technology is pretty much established and well described on the internet. See tutorials here and here for example. I’m sure it will be no problem to implement the same workflow with existing open-source software.

Working on background for shot 59

Also, we have started reparations to render project in full resolution (1920×1080). Too early? No way! We already hit a few problems. Some of them we were able to fix quickly, but at the moment two of them remains.

First of all it is a parallelization problem in Synfig – right at the moment it doesn’t support more than one thread in commandline rendering. Of course we can always tell Remake to run several jobs at once, but that’s not effective regarding to the memory consumption (considering that there us a shots requiring more than 3 Gb of RAM to render).

Second problem is more serious – we have hit a bug which leads Synfig to crash when trying to render animation with Warp layer at high resolution. It is really blocking issue and right now I’m looking for workaround.

This is all my news for today. Have a great week, everyone!

Here’s a little video I have prepared on how we do coloring using colorcharts in Synfig.

The colorcharts is very cool feature for animation projects – you have all key colors defined in one file and when you change this file, all colors are changed in the whole project. So you can dynamically tweak colors for your characters with a single click.

Colorcharts are natively supported in Synfig through the linking feature. Many people know that you can link parameters in Synfig within one file, but very few know that you can link to parameters from other files. And this is how colorcharts work – we just link all colors to the exported values in another file. See video below for detailed explanation.

Apologies for my English. ^__^

Another week passed by. The activity in the project increasing and there are lots of things I want to share today.

First of all, we are happy to get two participants joined our community call for vectorization. Don’t be distracted by the small number of participants. I should say – even one person can make a significant difference and even a little help with such a big job is significant. I want to give a special mention to Yu Chen – he is working very intensively. We are very happy he is joined our efforts.

This week we got first submission of soldier variation by Marco Antonio Real Adame. He is joined our soldiers community call on July 21st and yesterday have presented his work (see soldier-2.blend file in repository). Now he took the task to animate his model for shot 07. Let’s see how this will turn out!

Isn’t that guy is charming one? ^_^ Still I haven’t played with render settings yet…

Also the work on Ivan and Morevna models is still on the way and we already got some awesome results. But I should handle myself to announce final decisions on August 15th.

Nikolay did a great work by vectorizing all keyframes of Ivan for shot 20. Now they are pending for my review. I have been doing some vectorization too, as well as administration routines. Also, I managed to do one more important thing (that surely should have been done earlier) – set up the colorchart for the main characters. Now its possible to use common colorchart files for vectorized artwork (I hope to to post video about that soon).

  

And finally, good news for everyone who got “more than $100″ rewards from our donation campaign – the promised goodies are finally packaged and sent! My apologies for taking it so long. The tracking numbers will be provided by e-mail on personal basis.

That’s all for today. Have an awesome week, everyone!

Tweening and Vectorization status (30.07.2012)

I will start today’s weekly progress from screencast demonstrating our “lazy tweening” approach.

This approach can be shortly summarized in following steps:

1. Vectorize each keyframe independently.
2. Use stickman to deform first keyframe to second and create tweening transition.
3. Repeat the same for second and third keyframes and so on.

We have spent the whole week testing how much this approach suitable for making different types of animation. And hey – it’s kind of all-purpose thing! (Except maybe some cases of close-up headturns…)

When we settled this approach, we found that even for complex animation it’s possible to vectorize each keyframe independently. That means we can break each shot into small tasks and ask for community help with vectorization. That’s how we started the last community call for Synfig users.

Does someone thinks that we plan to have a rest and wait when  all hard work will be done by the community? No way! The community call is just an experiment to find talented Synfig artists around and proof that we can collaborate with them. And we are still working hard to deliver most and the best!. ^__^ Last week we have hit very complex shots – I have spent much time on shot 34 and Nikolay worked hard on shot 19. The next challenge for us is shot 20 – the most complex shot of the demo. Nikolay already started to work on it today.

Tweening and Vectorization status (23.07.2012)

At the same time the work on Ivan and Morevna models continued. The modelling is mostly done and now we are waiting for rigging and textures. Also we have two artists willing to improve truck and helicopter model and three persons interested in creating soldier model variations. I can’t wait to see how all this turn out!

EDIT: The call is closed. Thank you everyone who participated!

See details

Today we’re taking one more step to attract the community to Morevna Project development. This time we will ask for attention from Synfig users.

Let me introduce you:

We are working hard vectorizing and tweening the keyframes made by Nikolay. Still, looks like efforts of two men are not enough here. We are asking Synfig users to help us with keyframes vectorization.

All keyframes should be vectorized using stickman template. This process is described in video tutorial here. We will provide a .sif file with everything set up in place (keyframes combined with stickman) and your job is to vectorize all parts according to “stickman workflow. All vectorized parts should be attached to stickman – this is mandatory requirement.

We have spent a lot of time thinking about the best way to organize this process. We’re on the hard deadlines, so we understand that we need to optimize it as much as possible. That’s why we have decided to turn this process into a game!

Here are the rules:

1. You contact us by e-mail (see below) identifying that you are willing to offer vectorization help.
2. We will assign the task to you and send you all supporting files – zipped sif file with keyframe image, plus some notes about coloring, line width, etc. One person cannot take more than one task at once.
3. We will wait 48 hours for you to submit the finished task. Possible cases:
   • The finished result isn’t submitted within 48 hours – the task is transferred to another person.
   • The finished result submitted within 48 hours – we review it and if accepted you get 1 point to your personal score.
   • The finished result submitted within 24 hours and if accepted you get 2 points to your personal score.
4. We contact you informing about results. The task is over.
5. Whether you succeed completing task or not, after the task is over you can contact us to get the next task and process is repeated. The higher your score – the more complex tasks are available to you.
6. The  game will be finished on September 1st.

We will appreciate your help very much. and of course everyone with at least one accepted work will get mention in the credits.

So come on, Synfig community! Join us! Join our little competition!

Last week I have spent 5 days attending the festival of children’s animation “FireBird” in Novosibirsk. We had a screening of the work done by kids under my direction and got some awards. One of the important festival events was a meeting with Plenipotentiary Presidential Representative in the Siberian Federal District Viktor Tolokonsky. The talk haven’t touched Morevna Project directly, but some of our latest achievements were mentioned.

The bottom side of this event is that I almost haven’t worked on Morevna during those days (you probably noticed the the missing weekly progress post). That means I am working this week with double efforts. Right now I’m reviewing all the work done by Nikolay during my absence.

Also, people reported the instability of the Synfig packages we provided in previous post. Looks like my approach for fixing “on-close” bugs was a bit wrong. Now I have made a different fix – it should be much more stable now. Please grab binary packages from the software page.

One important note. Looking at our modifications people may think that the main Synfig developers are inactive at the moment. This isn’t true. Last months Carlos Lopez Gonzalez and Nikita Kitaev are working hard on implementing cairo-optimized rendering engine for Synfig Studio. This should give a major performance boost for the workarea redrawing operations and it is critical step for the whole project development. And of course this is a way more complex task than the tiny modifications we did. This is a long road, but I believe – they will succeed.

That’s all for the moment – back to work!