Weekly progress

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.

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!