Morevna Project

It’s been a long time since I’m wrote something useful here. Though, lots of things happened during that period and I feel a need to share with you, my dear readers, some random thoughts.

Last time I have a lot of work with Synfig Studio. Making Production Cuts video and directing some external Synfig animation projects lead me to the idea of improving morevnaproject’s rendering system.

Currently the rendering system is based on pure “make” and works the same way as typical build system used to compile Linux software: you write rules in special “Makefiles”, describing how to compile (in our case – render) your files. (more…)

On May 31, 2010 new version of Synfig Studio was released. You can download it from the packages page.

Major reasons to upgrade:

• Reworked Motion Blur layer.
• Better SVG import
• New functionalities of Normal Tool
• Improved rendering to avi when using ffmpeg target
• Fixed issue with tablets and other input devices at first run
• Fixed issue with remembering windows layout

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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.

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

Here’s a video about merging two similar images with different size/rotation in Synfig Studio. One image contains corrections for another, so it’s important to properly combine them together. Synfig has a few tricks allowing to handle this task with grace.

merging-image-corrections-with-synfig.ogv (27 Mb)

OpenSource software could evolve really fast and dramatically change behavior from version to version. Those changes could produce regressions. That’s why it is necessary for all Morevna Project  members to use the same versions of production software.

Blender is included in the repositories of all popular linux distributions, but usually without FFMPEG support. Though, it is easy to obtain appropriate binary from blender.org official site. Situation with Synfig Studio is worse. We’re using development version from SVN, because it contains some nice recently developed features and have more bugs fixed. From time to time it is happens what we discovering new bug, and if it is fixed we are not waiting for the release and jumping to next SVN version.

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Stickman video

During the drawing of keyframes for scene 20 we decided to concertize the motion of Ivan by using stickman. Generally, making stickman in Synfig is a simple task, but this one – with forward kinematic.

We made two videos about the process. First video is about finishing making stickman in Synfig Studio – only one hand left, and the head. Next one is about animating the top part of the stickman, Legs are already set up, animating the rest.

Sorry about the files size, but on YouTube those videos look just awful.

EDIT: There is a simpler approach of making stickman exists – without the need to use Radial Composite Converts and Rotate layers. Anyway, here’s two synfig stickman templates: stickman.sifz and stickman-simple.sifz. Enjoy!

Synfig has no feature to manipulate camera view. Me and Genete arranged a workaround to have a camera fake using logarithm convert type and the zoom layer.

Download

Here’s the latest version of camera widget: camera-view-0.3.sifz.

License: Public Domain.

You could find instructions on it’s usage below.

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Yesterday, genete and dooglus worked on the ugly rotation bug in Synfig and today finally fixed it! This bug was considered as a blocker for us and that fix making me especially happy. Just compare by yourself:

• Before: rotation-before.avi (0,6 Mb)
• After: rotation-after.avi (1,3 Mb)

This video shows how the equivalent of blender’s IPO drivers technique could be natively implemented in Synfig Studio.

Example file: ipo-drivers-synfig.sifz.