I'm glad we have a section here for other graphics applications and that it is separate from Gimp graphics.



Here is one I recently started designing in Synfig Studio:



It can still use much more polishing, it's not a final piece. It began with me trying to figure out a method to make a weaving animation in Synfig Studio. The first design began as just a weave of one thin blue line going through some black lines. It was slowly adjusted from there over a few hours time. While it looks like one continuous animation, in fact it is four separate animations, each running on it's own, combined to look like one single flowing animation. That is the trick of animation, deceive the viewer. Did I succeed?



It has kind of a spring theme to it. I can imagine having the weave animation, followed by some text floating in like "Happy Spring", "Welcome Spring" or something similar, and maybe some butterflies or birds also float into position. A lot of possibilities here.

Thank you for viewing this.





Edit: Here is a link to the Synfig .sifz file for anyone wanting to see how I got the animation to this point:

Synfig Weave .sifz file

Feel free to modify it and use it as you like.

Wow that is so cool. I love it. Yes it sure does have the Easter or spring look.... I must check out what Synfg is.

Molly,

Thanks for the kind response.

Here is the link to

Synfig Studio

It is free and open source and available for users of Windows, Mac OSX, and GNU/Linux.

They have some decent animation tutorials on their wiki page:

Synfig Tutorials

Thanks again for your comment.

Thank you very much ccbarr.
While you were writing, I Googled it, downloaded, and watched the first tutorial. It is very interesting. I will watch a few more of the tutes later to see more.

Thanks again....
Molly.

Well, I have been mucking around for hrs now and I can't get anything to work. I did get some small circles but couldn't do anything with them. I couldn't get them to have ducks, (cyan dots). I will try some more later, maybe I will get lucky.

molly,

Did you try the basic synfig animation tutorial?

Just as with Gimp, it can feel overwhelming at first using it. I know I felt that way.

If you would like to try a simple animation, having a circle move from point A to point B and back to point A, I'll post some simple steps for you here:

After opening Synfig Studio, you have a lot of windows that open. The two to concern yourself with at the moment are the main Canvas window, which is comparable to the Gimp Image Window, where you do you drawing. The other is the Toolbox window, like Gimp it has the various Tool icons on it.

First, place your mouse pointer anywhere inside the Canvas portion of the Canvas window (the part with the checkerboard squares), right-click your mouse and select:

Edit | Properties

In the window that opens, towards the bottom there are three tabbed sections. Click on the Time section.

In there set your Start Time to 0f (for frame zero) and End Time to 5s (for five seconds) Set Frame per Second to 24.00.

Once you have made those changes, if you have to at all, click OK to close the window.

Click on the Circle Tool from the Toolbox window.

Somewhere towards the upper left corner of your Canvas Window, click and drag out your mouse a short distance to make a little circle.

When finished, go back to the Toolbox window and select the Normal Tool, basically looks like and arrow with a circle shading on it.

Go back to your Canvas window and in the lower right corner of the window, beyond the Canvas area, there is a little green dot. If you hover your mouse over it, it will say: "Not in Animate Editing Mode"

Click it and it will turn red. If you hover your mouse over it again, it will now say: "In Animate Editing Mode"

Also, you will now see a red border around your Canvas in the Canvas window. That let's you know any changes you make in this mode will affect the animation of your objects. In this case you only have one, a circle.

Now, if the circle you drew in the Canvas window does not have a green dot in the center click with your mouse pointer somewhere inside the circle to activate it. There is also a green dot on the edge of the circle, but please to not click on it for this tutorial. Then place your mouse pointer over the center green dot in the circle and click and hold down your mouse button and drag the circle to the lower right corner of the Canvas. That will be the starting position for the Circle. (Normally, instead of moving it into it's first position, you would set a keyframe for the first position of the circle before moving it, but that can be for a later tutorial.)

At the bottom left of your Canvas window, you see a little window with 0f in it. That lets you know what frame of the animation you are in. 0f is the beginning of the animation, at zero frames.

Double-click in that box and change it to 2s12f (means 2 seconds and 12 frames, which is the half way point of your animation). Then press the Enter key.

Now click on the center of the circle and holding down your mouse button, drag it back up to the upper left corner of the Canvas.

Synfig now knows it must move the circle from the lower right corner where it was to the upper left corner.

Next, go back to that box in the lower left of the Canvas window and change the value in there from 2s12f to 5s then press your Enter key.

Now, with the Normal Tool still active, place your mouse cursor again over the green dot in the center of the circle and click-drag the circle back down to the lower right corner of the Canvas. Try to get it near the position it was before, but it doesn't have to be perfect.

You have just completed your first Synfig animation.

Now, to Preview it, just hold your mouse pointer inside the Canvas portion of the Canvas window (but outside the boundaries of the Circle) and right-click and select:

File | Preview

A little Preview Options window opens. Just accept the default options and click on the Preview Button.

In the Preview Window that opens, click the little circular arrows button (if you hover your mouse cursor over it, it says Toggle Looping)

Then click on the little Green Arrow beside it to play the animation. If all went well, the little circle should go back and forth between the two corners.



The animation would still need to have a background added and then rendered, but this tutorial was just about helping you to make the animation. You can save it as a .sifz file, which is a normal Synfig file format. I have a dedicated Synfig folder to keep all of my Synfig work in. The sifz files are very small in size and you can easily send them to another Synfig user to see your results before you would render it into a GIF file or into separate image files, or into a video file.

Well, just throwing this out in case you want to give it a try. Thanks.

That's a neat animation.
Synfig and Inkscape go great hand in hand together.

A plug-in for Gimp that converts an image to the synfig format.
http://synfig.org/wiki/Gimp2synfig

EDIT:
This is a Python script so you need Python installed also (Python-2.6 version)

Rod,

Thanks for the comment. I agree that Inkscape and Synfig go together.

Also thanks for the information on that Gimp plug-in. That looks like a very handy feature to use between Gimp and Synfig, in that it allows multilayer images to be imported into Synfig from Gimp. Going to grab that right away, thanks again.

Your very welcome.

@ ccbarr,
I did your little tutorial and it worked out perfect. I know what my problem was. I have a Wacom tablet which I only use as a mouse pad for the mouse that was included with the tablet. I don't use the pen at all because I prefer the mouse. Anyway, the settings for the tablet were interfering with the synfig configurations.

Thank you again for making the tutorial so I could understand it...

I could never really understand Synfig Studio, nice result though! The Synfig animations always seem so nice, and smooth, I Like It!