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. Also those rules contain dependencies between all your sources. That’s very cool – “make” utility tracks the changes in your files and when you tell it to rebuild/re-render your project, it looks if any of the dependent files changed or not and invokes build/render procedure only if the change happened. Very cool. It saves a lot of time and efforts. You don’t need to remember which files need to be re-rendered if you have changed something essential (like bike model or – eww! – lightning template). The bottomside is that Makefiles are quite complex for ordinary user, you need to maintain all dependencies by hand and keep them up to date. For small projects it’s too time consuming to set up make infrastructure. It’s very unlikely to expect that average user will study make rules and use them in the daily work. Sometimes you just need to quickly setup directory tree, do your work and archive (or trash) result when everything is done – and all that int 2 or 3 days – there’s no time to write all those rules.

Projects like automake and quickly lead me to the idea is to have a “bridge” application between pure “make” and the user. It should generate Makefiles on the fly from user request and then let “make” to do the rest of the work. That can be achieved by introducing a set of conventions about the directory structure of the project sources and developing the tool itself. Most probably the result will look like some kind of project template accompanied with control application. We plan to make it available to community for reuse in any other animation project.

I still not sure about the name for the tool. I am going to call it “remake”. Any other ideas? At this moment I can tell that the idea is implemented at 70%, so we still have some time to think. BTW, realization of the tool lead us to some project restructuring – expect changes in repositories soon.

List of dependencies (1) transformed into Makefile (2). In the final version dependencies will be detected automatically.

About further evolution of this idea. It can be a web frontend for git configured for animation content. That should include generating snapshots for commits, diffs for animations and automated rendering. That’s totally crazy idea – I’m aware,  that I have no hardware resources and, most importantly, no time to implement it in nearest future.

More about used software (most probably I should have name this post Random Software News, eh-heh-heh). As you know, morevnaproject is closely related with development of Synfig Studio. We had hard times since we started web infrastructure reorganization at synfig.org and there’s still a lot-lot of work to do. Most of things are still messed up, but we keep moving. Released 0.62.01 version promises to be much more stable than previous one as it resolves some annoying issues.

There’s another valuable step made related to Synfig – we have started writing official documentation. Of course it consumes much time (again), but it’s strategically important to get more users into Synfig, build solid and growing user community and thus, have more contributors for Morevna Project. We plan to release documentation in three media formats – online, pdf and printed book.

Some words about Synfig’s future. Of course it will be bright, happy, etc. But I’m not about that. I want to share another crazy idea popping into my head recently. Probably most crazy one. Often I watched a people coming to IRC asking how they can do interactive animations with Synfig like flash ones. Those requests used to irritate me. From the start Synfig was developed for high quality animation production, not for cheap web animations. Synfig’s visualization is slow, the animation needs to be rendered, rendered animation is huge, adding interaction to rendered video is a big problem… But time passed by, Synfig is changing, we got opengl branch… And suddenly I have realized: hey, why not? ^__^ If we will get opengl optimization, then we will get realtime rendering and that means Synfig’s files can be visualised on the client side. All people will need is the browser plugin.  Now, let’s imagine Synfig developers will add just a single new feature – a hyperlinks. Now synfig animation is not just an animation anymore, it’s hypertext!.. err… hyperanimation? Then suddenly from animation package Synfig turns into web authoring package. It is powerful for animation, it is free, it’s WYSIWYG, it’s format is readable like HTML – Synfig can beat flash here… maybe even HTML? Who knows…

You may notice that we had very few commits in out git repositories last time. The reason is that most artwork produced goes into drafts. I haven’t managed to find time to integrate them into git repository, but you can watch some of them on the wiki. These days I’m spending much time trying to improve my drawing skills. watching artbooks, especially Gainax ones – like “Groundworks of Evangelion” and “Gainax Artbook”. That pursuits my learning very well.

That’s all my thoughts for the moment. Stay tuned!

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

More info

In previous versions of Synfig Studio implementation of Motion Blur layer was quite incomplete. It was impossible to control count of image duplicates used to produce blurred image. That was making impossible to use Motion Blur with high aperture values for the fast moving objects. Those issues were fixed by adding more parameters to the Motion Blur layer. Now it’s possible to control every aspect, including blur detail and transparency. Also, there are three types of algorithm available to choose.Normal Tool is renamed to Transform Tool, as it now can be used not only for moving ducks, but for rotating and scaling too. Hold CTRL or ALT for that. Use SHIFT to constrain rotation or scale.

New ffmpeg prameters dialog allows to choose from the full range of codecs supported by ffmpeg and set bitrate of encoded video.

The new version also resolves several annoying issues.

Synfig Studio 0.62.00 had a nasty bug related to the status of input devices set at first startup. That bug prevented mouse cursor from moving in the workarea distracting many new users. This bug was fixed in the new release.

Another annoying bug was about the windows placement in Synfig Studio. For several reasons it wasn’t alway correctly restored at startup. This bug was also fixed.

That’s it, enjoy the 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

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.

SVN version need to be compiled from source. It could be not obvious task. I can’t say to everyone: “Hey, let’s update from SVN2030 to SVN2316 right now!” ^_^ Some of us jumping from one version to another to test new features – it is  time-consuming to rebuild them every time.

One of possible solutions we chose is to build and distribute packages. It’s impossible to build separate package for every Linux distribution – there is too much of them. So packages should be as much distribution-neutral as possible. They should be easy to download and install – better to provide a single all-in-one package, allowing just click-and-install (usually SynfigStudio is splitted to three or more packages). Thus, packages should contain minimum dependencies and rely only on components which most systems have installed already. This allows to easily install packages on PC’s which have no internet connection available.

Now it’s easier to get the software required for working with production tree. Grab it from the Packages page.

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!

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.

Tutorial

Some synfig users got confused about the managing ValueBase Nodes of imported canvases. This tutorial demonstrates the usage of camera widget and also shows how this problem is solved in synfig-fu.

Download camera-view-0.3.sifz (camera widget itself) and example.sifz (background which we will pan and zoom). Rename camera-view-0.3.sifz to camera-view-example.sifz – this will be a “instance” of camera widget containing pan/zoom data for particular file (example.sifz).

Open camera-view-example.sifz in Synfig Studio. The red border shows the area visible in camera view. You could manipulate camera by clicking on the black semi-transparent box and dragging the widget ducks.

Select “File” -> “Import” command, choose example.sifz file and press OK. The example will be placed on top of all layers. Place it at the bottom of the layers stack.

Go to the Children panel. Here you can see “camera view” ValueBase Node checkbox. It allows to switch between view from the camera and arbitrary view.

But the example.sifz file contains its own ValueBase Nodes which are not shown here. To get access to them just open the example.sifz (but keep leave camera-view-example.sifz opened).

Switch to the just opened canvas window and look at the Children Panel. There you will see ValueBase Nodes belonging to example.sifz file. Modify the “a_sh” ValueBase Node. You will notice, what  modification will affect not only example.sifz file, but camera-view-example.sifz too. That’s because the example.sifz was linked to the camera-view-example.sifz file during import.

So, here’s the workflow: if we want to change the camera animation, we will work in the camera-view-example.sifz window, but if we want to change the animation which we pan or zoom, we just switching to the example.sifz window and work there.

That’s all for today, good luck!

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

Example file: ipo-drivers-synfig.sifz.