How to Animate using Synfig Studio (Quick Tutorial, Free program)

hello my name is turtle army Jess and today I want to teach you about how I create short animated gifs using a program called synfig studio synfig studio is a free open-source animation program it's available for Mac PC and Linux the link to their website is in the description there's already some resources out on the internet about how to use it and it has a pretty extensive wiki but when I started using synfig about three years ago I didn't want to read I just wanted to get started as soon as possible this tutorial is by no means complete but it covers many of the basics this crash course is what I wish I had when I was just starting out in this course I'm gonna go over the toolbar how to make shapes how to organize layers and animation mode in the final section I'll show you step-by-step how to animate a simple gift from start to finish if you want to skip anything timestamps are listed in the description on the left is the tool bar hovering your mouse over each tool tells you what they do underneath the tools you have your colors when making shapes the upper left corner is for outlines and the bottom right corner is for regions or fills hit the swap button to switch the colors for this tutorial I'm going to focus on the most basic tools those being the shapes and the draw tool other very important buttons are the yellow undo button that I use a lot and also the Save button that I use frequently the plus and minus on the lower left are useful for zooming in and out under canvas properties I can adjust the image size and how long the animation will take as you can see I'm still in a default of 24 frames per second and a duration of 121 frames or five seconds these can be modified at any time but resizing after you've already drawn shapes can alter how your shapes are spaced so I try to set this at the beginning and then not change it when you select one of the shape tools I'll use the circle over here on the right are your options each image that you create goes on its own layer these are the different types of layers that you can create while making your shape you can make more than one layer at once by clicking to highlight them for beginning animation the first three types are the most important the first is a perfect shape layer it creates simple shapes that cannot be altered other than the position and the size more on that later the second is a region layer and the third is an outline layer as you can see the colors of the region and outline match the colors in the selector region and outline work great together so I recommend you keep them on for mouth shapes underneath the layers are your settings be careful if you're scrolling through the menu with a mouse wheel so that you don't accidentally change your settings the blend method controls how shapes interact with each other if you're keeping it simple keep it on composite I may go over the other blend types in a separate tutorial later you can also change the opacity here the thickness of the outline and also the number of spline points that control how complex the shape is I'll explain that in a bit but for right now I'll make the middle circle 4 and the right circle 8 each shape that you create will be entered on your layers panel on the bottom right you can rename your layers if you want you can also select layers to duplicate them or delete them regions can be added to outlines by right-clicking make outline or vice versa to add outlines to regions if you click on a shape either in your layers panel or on your screen in the middle you can see some dots or handles on each shape you can toggle which handles are visible on this top bar screen is for position and the blue is for radius as you can see these are the only things you could control with a perfect circle regions outlines give you much more control and if you have a region outline created together they're linked and your changes will alter both of them orange controls the position of the vertices and yellow controls the tangents lastly purple controls the line thickness of outlines you can left-click and draw a box and select multiple points at a time the number of these handles present on your shape was controlled by the number of spline points from the previous menu the middle circle having four and the right circle having eight you can also add more by right-clicking and selecting insert item and keep shape you can remove points by right-clicking and selecting remove item if you want to make a sharp angle right click on the tangent and select split tangents so the circle rectangle and star shapes all work in pretty much the same way and the polygon tool can make complicated shapes out of straight lines by adding and subtracting points and moving handles around you can pretty much manipulate any shape into any other shape but if you're trying to make something complicated or with a lot of curves you can save time using the draw tool the two most important options that are different and the draw tool are the smoothness and the auto loop option checking the auto loop will make your shape complete if your two ends are close enough to each other while increasing the smoothness will decrease the number of spline points generated while making your shape here's a figure 8 shape with a smoothness of 1 now here's the same shape with a smoothness of 5 to change colors you can either select the layer and change it by double clicking here on the bottom left or you can use the paint bucket tool the dropper tool can select colors I'm going to speed draw a super quick and simple character to show you how I organize my layers I'll be altering circles for most of them for that I want to share a really important tip if you are going to use this character for multiple animations you're going to want to create a separate reference file for your character it's possible to have multiple projects open and copy and paste your characters in between them but if you've already made the character do an animation the animation will also be copied over as well so if your first animation was a guy running and you want to reuse his model for a gift where he's standing still you would copy/paste him and then have to use a lot of work to delete each animation I prefer to make a reference file usually with just one frame and I create the character's model every time I want to reuse that character I can copy/paste from the reference file and then start fresh from the reference each time every outline region and shape creates its own layer which is displayed at the bottom right in the layers panel along with its Z depth which controls the order of the layers the lower the number the closer it is to the viewer you can raise and lower the buttons to adjust your Z depth you can also toggle the visibility of your layers grouping layers can be done by highlighting multiple layers and selecting the group button with this folder grouping layers allows you to move or apply transformations to multiple layers at once and I'll get to that in a minute I'm going to make a group for his face now when I select that folder I've got more handles associated with the folder if I use these handles it'll affect every layer in that group the green is for doing translations red slants things the yellow affects the proportions either horizontally or vertically while the orange adjusts the scale in both directions the blue rotates the shape in my experience I only ever used the green translate on these folders for example if I want to have him move his face to look left or right I don't like using the other buttons because they adjust the proportions of the outlines the way I prefer to do my character movements is through transformation layers and I will now go over those three types these layers are added by right-clicking and selecting transformation and then the type of transformation you'd like to do each of these transformation layers affects every layer beneath it so I will add a translation layer the green handle here is to control the position if I put it here at the top of my layers panel it'll move the entire character if I place it down here it'll only move the layers underneath it the torso in this case if you place the transformation inside a group it'll only affect the layers below the transformation in that group so if I put it in my character's arm only that will move the next type of layer is scale to change the size of every layer under it it's really important to note that the green circle in this transformation is not for moving your object it's for moving the origin point of the scaling the last type of transformation layer is the rotation layer so I'm going to have my character wave his arm I'll go into my arm layer and insert the rotation layer it comes up here the green handle is to set the pivot point that your layers will rotate around the blue handle is for changing the angle so I'll move the green pivot point to the character's shoulder and now I can rotate it okay onto animating for this animation I'm going to have my little character blow a bubble out of his gum it's going to pop and get stuck to his face and then he's going to be surprised I'm going to quick add a few more layers to my piece I'm going to add a little pink bubble of gum and then I'm going to draw the splat on his face but I'm going to hide the spot for now I will get back to it the button down here turns animate mode off and on when it's off the button will be green changes made when it's off will be applied to every frame in your animation when it's on the button will be red and there'll be a red border around your screen I want him to blow his gum bubble for about a second or 24 frames with the animation mode on I will select 24 on my timeline this frame is important to me so I will hit this plus button to add a keyframe I can also select the keyframe button to rename them and keep them organized with my cursor at this time I will grab the pink bubble and make it bigger down on the timeline you can see there's a little yellow diamond or a Waypoint that was created you can also see at the beginning of the timeline there's a second diamond created at the zero frame the Waypoint diamond on the left is sin fig remembering the original position of the bubble the right diamond is sin fig remembering the ending position of the bubble these waypoints only affect this layer so they'll only be visible if the bubble is selected if I drag the cursor over the timeline I can see that the in-betweening was done for me if I need to make the movement happen slower or faster I can move this way point waypoints can also be deleted with a right-click and remove next I want the bubble to disappear because it was popped so with the bubble layer selected at the correct time I'm going to change the amount to zero in the lower left parameters window now you can see that synfig is doing the in-betweening for me and the bubble slowly disappears over time but what I want is a sudden pop so I'm going to change house and fig does the in-betweening I can do this in two ways the first way is to right-click the Waypoint select both and then select constant now as I move around in the timeline you can see the bubble abruptly disappears at this keyframe the second way to change the in-betweening is to change this drop down from clamped to constant then all the animation waypoints you create will use this so I'm going to make my splat visible at 0 frames I'm then going to change the amount to 0 and at 24 frames I'll make it 1 everything looks right so it's time to move on I'll set this back to clamped now I want my character to have a reaction to the gum sticking to his face so he's going to give his arms a little wave I want him to wave and then return to normal after about a second so I'll set another keyframe at 48 frames in between the keyframes I'll use the rotation layer to raise his arm here now because I have these past and future keyframe buttons locked you can see that 3 waypoints are the original down position on the left then the up position in the middle and then the up position again on the right if I didn't want his arm to return back down I could unlock the future Waypoint now when I move his other arm there is not a Waypoint created at the keyframe on the right I usually keep these locked 95% of the time if you want to have his arm returned in the same position with my cursor at the correct space in the timeline I can duplicate the previous way point if I want to change the timing on his arm waving I can move the waypoints or I can move entire key frames if I move a keyframe all of the points in between the key frames will move automatically the last thing I want my character to do is to have him lean backwards slightly like the bubble pop surprised him and he's falling over but I forgot to add a rotation later always turn animation mode back off to add new layers I'm going to add the rotation layer here at the top of the organization so it affects his whole body I will put the origin down here even though the origin is off the screen it still works make sure that you turn animation mode back on to do this final movement making animation is more interesting or natural-looking isn't something I can talk about because I'm still a beginner that sort of thing comes with practice or by watching better YouTube tutorials now that I'm pretty sure my animation is good to go and last thing to do is render the completed animation file and render the simplest way to render a gif is to make sure your destination is in the documents then make sure the ending of your file is gif and finally select the target as magic + + this may take a few minutes you don't want to touch your file until after you see the words file rendered successfully here the way you render your animations may vary depending on your operating system and what program you're going to use to compile your video go check the wiki for full details this is just the simplest way for me to do a gift for me this method works great for Twitter Facebook deviantART and pretty much everywhere except for discord and it's done your gif is now ready to post speaking of which thank you so much for watching this tutorial if this tutorial helped you make anything please let me know I would love to see it and if you want to see anything that I've made I have a couple animations on my youtube channel and a whole bunch of gifts on my Twitter and deviantART links are in the description if you have any questions or recommendations for what I should do a tutorial about next please let me know in the comments or send me a message thanks again for watching until next time

Channel: TurtleArmy Jess

Views: 256,723

Keywords: Synfig, Synfig Studio, Synfig Studios, Animation, Tutorial, How to, animate, fast, beginner, get started, free

Id: 5B_Aok26LKc

Length: 13min 42sec (822 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 27 2020