You might want to start with 1920x1080 (1080 HD) if you've got a moderately powerful computer, or lower if you're on a less powerful computer. In the properties window, enter your desired canvas size. Property panels appear along the right.īefore starting, go to the Canvas menu in the menu bar and select Properties (or press F8 on your keyboard). The upper left panel holds your tools, the central panel your canvas, and the bottom panel the timeline and keyframes. The layout of Synfig is probably familiar to anyone who's used an animation application before or even a graphics application in general. tar file, just untar, place into a sensible directory such as "~/bin," and run synfigstudio. deb, then use your system's package manager to install them as usual. Your distribution might package Synfig in its repository, but be sure to download the most up-to-date version directly from upstream. If you'd like to fund their excellent work, visit /morevna and subscribe to their content! Installing Better still, as they work, they are developing and improving the tools they use and committing their code for everyone to use. The Morevna Project, a small anime studio, is producing not only content but several tutorials about their tools, with everything being produced on an open source stack, released as Creative Commons. For this reason, it's ideal for a solo artist or a small animation team. Synfig Studio is a "tweenless" animation system designed to speed up the animation process by using sprites and digital tweening rather than adding to the illustration workload. I can't review every animation application (at least, not all at once), so the last animation suite I'll look at this year is Synfig Studio. There are many more animation applications out there, not the least of which is Blender for 3D animation and all manner of hybrids (check out how some users are abusing the Grease Pencil tool for animation or the excellent Freestyle effect), GIMP Animation Plugin GAP, Tupi, the recently open-sourced OpenToonz, and many more. In the past two months, I've covered Krita Animation for hand-drawn digital cel animation and StopGo for stop motion animation. When I do, expect to see a detailed review.Animation is a robust field with a large number of specialties and an even larger number of tools for creating a particular look or style. I do hope to learn this software in the future. It could take your animations from looking obviously amateur to very professional looking indeed. If you want to graduate from using MS Paint and Windows Movie Maker (which seems to be a popular combination for many beginner animators) Synfig is definitely a giant leap forward. However, if you have a graphics tablet, Synfig will support it, including pressure sensitivity. From what I've read it doesn't support true flash exports (so you won't be using this to make props for your GoAnimations). You will need to export your animations into video editing software to add audio etc. One thing to note is that Synfig is not intended as a complete animation studio. Synfig is both Vector and Bitmap based and from the it's 2012 demo reel embeded below, I'd say, looks to have amazing potential. It's just going to take quite some time and quite a few tutorials to get myself up to speed to the point where I could do a proper review.įor now I just wanted to make you aware that this software is out there for free - for all you would be animators dreaming of the day you can afford something like Adobe Flash (CS5) or ToonBoom Animation Studio - this looks like a good alternative if you're really serious about 2D animation. Which is not the same as being hard to learn. The reason being, I fire this software up and it just looks like hard work to learn. So, even though I've just installed the latest version, don't expect a review. I've had previous versions of Synfig installed on my computer for some time and, I'm going to confess, I've never used it. There are versions available for Mac, Windows and Linux. However the program keeps getting updated with release 0.63.05 being made available on the 9th April 2012. It has been around for quite some time now and seems to have had a fairly checkered history in terms of development, as noted in TildeHash's blog last year, Potential for Free Animation Software dead? Not overly surprising for free, open source software. Synfig Studio is intended to be professional 2D animation software and is available to download for free.
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