How to animate with bones: Easy Synfig tutorial!

all right everyone welcome to what I hope will be a very efficient yet helpful tutorial so I know when I set out to learn animation I wanted to know how can I just take a picture of anything and just kind of put bones on it and bend it around that's one way of easily making something move without too much complicated expertise so I'm using the program synfig which is free for mac and pc and so I'll be showing you how to do the skeleton distortion in synfig so so to start out I just imported any ping image PNG image this happens to be a character I had around but you this can literally be something you doodle and take a picture with your phone it could be something from the internet whatever it does not require any artistic skill it's just find a PNG file and import it with something that has a translucent background so that you can work with it okay and then what I'm gonna do is I'm going to right click on that object and I'm gonna go to a new layer I'm gonna go to distortions I'm gonna go to skeleton deformation okay boom so you'll then to your terror everything disappears so the strange thing about this is for a lot of this tutorial is just about the very weird quirks of the random things you have to click to make this work it's very easy you just have to memorize these steps for some strange reason so I you uncheck or hide the skeleton you make sure this green box covers everywhere your character might move too so just make it as big as you want and then you start and then this is your first bone so I'll just put this at the bottom it can even be off the screen I'll put a kind of her mid torso there I'll put one in her upper chest just to make it kind of stable and then I'm gonna go ahead and kind of to represent her neck I'll do one from her from her body to her head so that way if I wanted her head to bobble I can and just a note here if you have sort of a big object that you want to make sure parts of it don't get lost you can add additional bones and I'm so sorry I should have said I'm just right clicking on either blue or the orange dot at the end of each bone oh sorry and I go to create child bone and and you can add them and reshape them however you like and again here I'm just adding some extra ones to make sure that I capture the entire head because it's kind of a funny shape on this character and then you can actually go back proximally to earlier bones you made if you want to have other branch points too so like I'm gonna do this one here for the shoulder and then that one can go we'll pretend an elbows down here and then we'll go up to this whole axe hand thing here and and for now let's just say that that kind of grabbed all that okay so when you're done there the next thing you do is you add back your width button the with handles so these are like the purple circles that appear when you turn that on and off that normally for a shape it's what you use to determine line thickness but here it's just you know you just have to make sure the purple covers everything or else it acts funny and cuts things off so what I do is I take kind of my base one I just make a giant that it covers everything and then I just kind of doodle arbitrarily and I'll humbly admit it doesn't totally seem to me that it correlates where how big I make these purple circles actually affects the strength of the bone but if anyone does have experience of this and wants to mention in the comments feel free I'd love to know but yeah I just make these like a decent size kind of covering the area that they're gonna cover and I apologize I don't I'm not more precise with the cause of those but anyway once everything's covered and I'm also hitting save as I go with ctrl s once all that's done then you unhide the skeleton you say oh no it's all gone so don't worry you just right-click skeleton and go to here reset pose not delete layer but reset pose boom and now it's all back to normal so again some weird buttons right that had like no real purpose to them but that's what you do so the key things were we made a skeleton layer we made our bones open so we made our skeleton layer then we hid the layer so that it wouldn't make everything go away we made the green box really big we put down our bones we use the purple circles and make sure they sort of just covered everything and then when we're ready we unhidden skeleton and then we right clicked for reset pose so at this point the purple circles are usually just in your way so you can get rid of those and then now you should be able to move things around so see now so as a reminder the blue circles are for angle green our position and orange our scale so if I move the blue you know blue is what you'll probably want to use the most if you're starting out and just trying to move things around so as you can see I can now move her head if I wanted to make her head bigger for some reason I could do that by going like that it'll kind of move it but also scale it theoretically that didn't really work very well well but yeah and then this axe can move around like that whoo-hoo and then so just as a review like anything else so that's how you make the bones and then if you wanted to animate it over a timeline I'll focus on that more slowly and other tutorials but basically I have a keyframe at frame 0 I'll throw a keyframe at frame 44 I'm going to click the green person to make it animate mode and let's say that by frame 48 I want the axe to go down and actually I want it to get a little bigger so I'm gonna maybe do that and I'll use the green position button to move it down so hopefully look like it's sort of swinging the axe and maybe she's kind of putting some force into it and so I'm kind of kind of shifted yeah and let's see I'm trying to think if she's using her shoulder like that maybe her if she's swinging the axe maybe that moves like that and I'm gonna hit save and I'm gonna hit this preview button and default settings are fine I'll make it low quality I don't know all right and I'll move this over here and I'll go to fit and let's see what we got so we have our friend here and I'm just gonna stop it right there OOP awesome so that's how you use skeletons in a nutshell so I hope this was helpful and I'll ya let me know Shinzon if anyone knows the answer to what those purple circles do that'd be great right

Channel: Med Ed Animation

Views: 34,011

Keywords: animation, how to, synfig, bones, skeleton, bone, tool, picture, animate, easy, tutorial, english

Id: LTlI7C0VyRc

Length: 6min 46sec (406 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 15 2019