Synfig is a very capable little graphics program that is mostly used for animation, but also can be used for graphics that are not moving. I was inspired by the discussion thread started by K1TesseraEna about gradients along paths. I wondered if I could do that with Synfig.

Synfig does have a Curve Gradient BLine. BLines behave similarly to Gimp Paths. The gradient however covers the entire layer:



Synfig also has plain vanilla BLines that can be Stroked somewhat like Gimp Paths, but with greater control features. Here is one simple BLine:



Synfig can make use of Layer Groups and can allow one to map the vertices of one BLine on to another resulting in a gradient that can follow a path:



Once I figured that out, animating it in Synfig was trivial. Not to say that creating the animation was trivial, since there is a learning curve in understanding how to make Synfig animnations just as there is with Gimp and GAP. Here is a simple example of an animated path gradient:



The above file is 1.6M in size, so it may take some time to load.

Thank you for checking this out.

That is amazing ccbarr.
I installed Synfig with yum install and then did a search to find it. This is what the Synfig folder looks like. How do I open it? It isn't in my software applications. Help would be appreciated.

Thank you molly.

Here I run synfigstudio as the command. I don't know about your flavor of GNU/Linux, but do you need to install synfigstudio as well? On my system, I must install both synfig and synfigstudio, but again, not sure how your system is set up. Synfig is the command-line version that you can run in a console window without a GUI, while synfigstudio is the GUI portion of the application.

Hope that might help some.

Really nice, looks like some kind of psychedelic worm.

Thank you ccbarr, I yum installed sygfigstudio and it installed ok.
BTW I have Fedora-17.
I just typed sygfigstudio in terminal and the animation software opened. Thank you so much.

That is absolutely amazing, ccbarr!
I have Synfig installed on my computer for 2 years or so and had no idea it was capable of such things.
It's more complicated program that it may seem at first glance and when I'd realized that i was reluctant
to do further steps in studying it. Now I will probably try to actually do something with it.

Thank you for sharing this!

I haven't tried it yet either cuz it looks difficult to me.

I heard from some users about 6-8 months ago that Synfig Studio was somewhat unstable but since then they released a new version.
I have plugins for GIMP and Inkscape to convert images to SIF format but never used them. If you have an intent to play with Synfig, molly,
here they are

Thank you, Seems I already have them. They must have come with my install from Fedora terminal.

If you click the Help button on the Toolbox, there's a link to tutorials, etc.
http://wiki.synfig.org/wiki/Category:Tutorials

Thanks O. Got it