Synfig Studio packages update

Synfig Studio packages have been updated. It is release candidate for the upcoming 0.62.02 version with a lot of usability improvements.

Please grab the updates from packages page.

Major reasons to upgrade:

  • Smart linking for tangents.
  • Option to forbid animation for any layer parameter to avoid accidental change in the animation mode.
  • New default blend method option – “By Layer Default”.

More info:

Smart linking for tangents is the most anticipate feature of the upcoming version.

Earlier, when linking two tangents of different color you used to get weird result. This behavior is caused by  Synfig Studio internals and is not obvious for the new Synfig Studio users. Workaround is explained in the special  Sewing Blines tutorial, but it’s kind of tedious work to link many tangents.

Initial setup before linking two tangents of different color
Result of bad link

Luckily, this isn’t the case anymore. The new Synfig Studio is smart enough to properly link tangents. This change deprecates concept of the “tangent color” for the user, as well as the Sewing Blines tutorial.

Next improvement is about allowing/forbidding animation for parameter. You can mark any parameter as not accepting the animation – static. That means that there’s no waypoints will be produced for them, even when you are in animation mode! No more tedious  jumping back and forth animation mode, when you want to change a parameter that supposed to be static during your animation. Some of the Parameters (like “Chilren Lock”) are already have this option enabled.

"Set Static" option in the parameter menu

And finally, one more great change is new option for default blend method.  Default blend method is controlled by the drop-down list in the toolbox. It defines the blend method for newly created layers and usually it’s set to “Composite” which is perfectly ok for most layer types. But some layers in Synfig Studio are intended to operate in the particular blend method, which is different from “Composite”.  Now it is possible to set the “Default blend method” option on the toolbox to “By Layer Default” and forget about the changing the blend method everytime when you creating layers like “Blur” or “Shade”. I guess this improvement is a step to completely eliminate default blend method from the toolbox and let each layer to define its blend method.

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One Response

  1. Awesome! I’m interested in being able to use Synfig, so maybe I will give it another shot one of these days. And it would be good for me to be able to animate for the Morevna Project sometime.

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