Software > Animation >

(on Wikipedia)
https://www.synfig.org/

A cross-platform open-source animation program.

I didn’t want to deal with Blender, so I checked this out for simple animations. So far, so good. Even at a glance it could have been done far better, but maybe I can make do.

• It’s annoying to download, and can be done directly from fosshub:

  • https://www.fosshub.com/Synfig-Development.html

• I wanted it for “tweening” (inbetweening)

—

• 2017-11-02 – 1.3.4 on Windows 10

• 2009-01-31 – 0.61.09-1 on (distribution not recorded)

2017-11-02 – 1.3.4 ∞

• Ugh, custom window style.
• It has its own windowing snap, so I could drag it around my desktop and I could let go and it would maximize.
• Uh, what? I have to use the transform tool to move something?
• Is there a way to keep an object within the boundaries of the canvas?
• I was futzing around with some sort of 120f text at the bottom-left of the canvas, trying to numlock on and off and type stuff, and I crashed it.
• There is a recovery feature, but it didn’t work.
• Fiddled around, and I can figure out the tweening, but I have no fucking clue how to extend the timeline. Why can’t this just work like an audio editor?
• Trying to render, crashed, cannot recover. I just want to do something simple before crashing.
• There appears to be no progress meter for rendering/saving.
• The synfig wiki has a bunch of error messages at its top, and it doesn’t have proper SSL.

• Canvas > Properties > Time – it expects me to do the math on the number of frames and seconds.

Well, I figured it out.. it needs a quality setting and to export as alpha, but I can get something exported with reasonable quality.

I think perhaps I could do simple animations, but being forced to deal in time units of frames is fucking retarded.

2009-01-31 – 0.61.09-1 ∞

Vector-based. If you hate GIMP, you’ll hate this. What a failure.

apt-get install synfig synfigstudio

• control-z doesn’t undo. I had to find and click “undo stroke”

  • Oh wait, it does work on the circle tool. But when I control-z it changes my tool to the “Normal” tool. =(
• I shouldn’t need to bother with rendering. I should be able to press space to start/stop an in-editor animation.

• Needs a progress bar for rendering.

  • Should be easy, since the commandline has a progress output.

I can’t use this tool. All the things I’m expecting to be able to do from all the other desktop publishing and animation tools I’ve used don’t work. I can’t even do basic things. So utterly hopeless, this program is just an animation studio version of GIMP. =(

I aborted a tutorial project for animating with Synfig, and my only note was “wow, I have no fucking clue what I’m doing. Synfig is utterly hopeless.”

Installation from source ∞

Thanks to: https://web.archive.org/web/20080417034702/synfig.org/Build_instructions

Note: I’ve built a lot of other software from source, so if you notice that ./configure spits out an error, check for that program in Synaptic (or its -devel equivalent). It will be there.

You can also grab stuff from their Subversion repository. If this document is old, visit their website for Git instructions. They’re trying git out, and they may switch to it in the future.

svn co https://sourceforge.net/p/synfig/code/HEAD/tree/ETL/trunk/ etl
svn co https://sourceforge.net/p/synfig/code/HEAD/tree/synfig-core/trunk/ synfig-core
svn co https://sourceforge.net/p/synfig/code/HEAD/tree/synfig-studio/trunk/ synfig-studio

su
apt-get install autoconf libxml++2.6_2-devel libsigc++2.0_0-devel libltdl3-devel libtool cvs gettext-devel libgtkmm2.4_1-devel

mkdir synfig-stuff
cd synfig-stuff
wget was [[archive:https://sourceforge.net/projects/synfig/files/OldFiles/ETL/0.04.12/ETL-0.04.12.tar.gz/download?use_mirror=master&modtime=1224707037&big_mirror=0|]]
wget was [[archive:https://sourceforge.net/projects/synfig/files/OldFiles/synfig/0.61.09/synfig-0.61.09.tar.gz/download?use_mirror=master&modtime=1224793932&big_mirror=0|]]
wget was [[archive:https://sourceforge.net/projects/synfig/files/OldFiles/synfigstudio/0.61.09/synfigstudio-0.61.09.tar.gz/download?use_mirror=master&modtime=1224707325&big_mirror=0|]]
tar -xvvzf ETL-0.04.12.tar.gz
tar -xvvzf synfig-0.61.09.tar.gz
tar -xvvzf synfigstudio-0.61.09.tar.gz
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig

cd ETL-0.04.12
autoreconf --install --force
./configure
make install
cd ..

cd synfig-0.61.09
libtoolize --ltdl --copy --force
autoreconf --install --force
./configure
make
make install
cd ..

cd synfigstudio-0.61.09
autoreconf --install --force
./configure
make
make install
cd ..
cd ..

Alternatives ∞

• Maybe Krita