Probably one of the most sought-after applications for Linux is a 2D animation solution. The fact that Adobe offers no Linux support for Flash sends many people to the Linux forums asking if there’s some sort of Flash-like program for Linux, myself included. I’ve looked at the common responses to these requests and most of them point to Synfig. Flash4Linux has been mentioned before, but it hasn’t been updated since 2005. Plus, Synfig is already included with Ubuntu Studio, so acquiring it is no problem. I’ve also seen the cool demo videos that show up in any search for Synfig videos. Also true is the dearth of tutorials and help files available for the beginner to follow in navigating this program. Part of me is slightly daunted by delving into this much unknown, but another part of me remembers that I learned the programs I know now by practicing with them until I eventually understood what I was doing, or could find some documentation to explain what was going on. Many posts I’ve read say “I’ll have to sit down and try this program out.” So I finally took some time to sit down and wrestle this unknown beast.

The first thing I see is the program uses a multi-window environment like GIMP (or Photoshop, Illustrator, or Inkscape for that matter). This doesn’t bother me as I use a dual monitor setup and have plenty of room for these.  I work my way through the Getting Started and Animation Basics tutorial on the Synfig wiki that lets you move a red dot across the stage and back. Creating the shapes is easy enough. It gets a little laborious when I have to enter in keyframes in one of the separate windows, then manipulate the object. Usually that sort of thing is done with frames under the time line, and here I’m looking at two separate windows. The other confusing part is that I have to click a button that activates “Animate Editing Mode”. I found I could move things around before this button was pressed, so what is the point of this mode? If you have to lock something down, wouldn’t it make sense to be able to lock the layers where objects reside?

The first major problem came when I tried to preview the animation. Preview brought up another window with shuttle controls. Playing it however, did nothing. The main window stayed still. I thought that maybe the preview window held the animation preview but it just wasn’t expanded enough. This wasn’t the case. This puzzled me. First of all, why not be able to play back the movie from the window you’re creating the animation in so you can zoom in certain parts of the screen for detail work? Second, if this didn’t work, were we expected to render every time we had to check something out? That would really slow things down, especially on longer projects.

I skipped past that and went to the next section on creating shapes. There was a small problem with this as the wiki was hacked by spambots. Later, I was able to find the lost text by accessing a previous version of the page, but for the most part I worked with these tools on my own. Creating with the bline tool brought me back to the familiar ground of creating vector shapes. However, the bline tool was a little more awkward than creating in, say Inkscape. For instance, after making a node (called a ‘duck’ in this program) a curve, I could only make it the angles unsymmetrical by right-clicking and choosing ’split tangents’ in a pull down menu. In Inkscape I just have to hold down the shift key while pulling on the tangent. Several actions relegated to the right-click menu of Synfig’s bline tool made things cumbersome. When making a closed path, instead of simply clicking on the first duck to close it off like in most programs, you right-click and choose ‘loop bline’ and sometimes it didn’t work. One thing I found I liked was the ability to adjust the thickness of the object’s outline at each duck, which was great for making shapes more organic looking. This is a nice stand-out feature and was fairly easy to use.

Other things in shape creation seemed needlessly complicated. When creating a shape with a fill, the outline and fill would be on separate layers. The wiki said they were linked, but there were times when I would move the object and only the outline or fill would move. And if you desire a gradient for your shape, you must first create a gradient that fills the whole stage, then ‘encapsulate’ that layer onto the outline, then adjust the gradient with tangents. Why can’t fills be more closely integrated with their outlines? Other tools like ’scale’ didn’t work at all.

The big shock came when I went to render this new test. Rendering crashed the program every time, no matter what format I chose. Now I seem to have an animation program that can’t show animation at all. It is impossible for me to create an animation from this program at all.

In trying to search for answers, I did run across a keyboard shortcut page that shed a little light on a few things. I know there’s a newer version of it just released that’s supposed to fix many bugs, but a universe package of it won’t be available until Gutsy Gibbon. I will probably attempt to install from source (I need the practice in compiling) to test it, but for now I’ve downloaded a trial of Anime Studio Pro to see how that works (I don’t mind paying the $200 for it it I choose that direction. Flash costs that much, but again, they don’t have Linux support). I don’t want to give up all hope for Synfig just yet. I search when I can for new posts about progress and I’ve joined the mailing list. I’d talk on the chat room for it if I could be sure I’d picked the right one. I’d love to contribute to making more output with this program and show people how powerful this program can be. But in it’s state right now, it can’t even output anything. It just stops. Kind of the opposite of ‘animation’.

Tags: animation, linux, web

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 16th, 2007 at 7:13 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.