The Synfig 2D Animation package

[Posted July 11, 2007 by cook]

Synfig is a 2D vector animation film production system that runs under Linux, MacOS X and Windows. The Synfig project overview and history explains:

Synfig is a powerful, industrial-strength vector-based 2D animation software package, designed from the ground-up for producing feature-film quality animation with fewer people and resources. While there are many other programs currently on the market to aid with the efficient production of 2D animation, we are currently unaware of any other software that can do what our software can.

One of the major and unique design goals of Synfig was to automate the tweening process, which involves smoothing out the coarse transitions from one image to the next.

Synfig started off as a commercial application. Primary developer Robert Quattlebaum's company Voria Studios, LLC released the software as open-source under the GNU GPL in early 2006. A January, 2006 OSNews interview with Quattlebaum covers the reasons behind this decision in more detail.

Synfig version 0.61.06 was recently announced: "It is the result of more than a year of contributions by the free software community. It has far fewer bugs, several usability enhancements, a set of new Tango-styled icons and other improvements."

A Linux screenshot shows the application's user interface. A few short animation clips are available on the Synfig gallery, they can be viewed with the MPlayer utility. Additional demos have been posted on YouTube. The quality of the demos shows that the software is indeed able to produce useful animation.

Synfig is available for download in source and package form here. There are a number of tutorials available for learning to use Synfig. The project is currently looking for assistance in the areas of C++ programming, art and documentation. Interested people should take part in the July 28, 2007 IRC meeting.

to post comments

The Synfig 2D Animation package

Posted Jul 12, 2007 10:36 UTC (Thu) by yodermk (subscriber, #3803) [Link] (2 responses)

Fascinating. It's always great to learn about new software for Linux that can do cool things I didn't before realize could be done with Free software.

Just a question -- is it possible to save animations with alpha channels so that, say you could put an animation on top of a recorded video using Cinelerra?

The Synfig 2D Animation package

Posted Jul 12, 2007 13:45 UTC (Thu) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

I would expect composition would be possible... Even if you had to do the equivelent of 'Blue screen' (or green) background for your animation. Were there is a will there is a way.

Cinerella should have nice composition features to enable you to do that.

Also Blender (the 3D animation suite) has image composition features also for doing things like this.

In fact if you have a nice backdrop it would be possible to do live action with a animated brackground if you wanted!

The Synfig 2D Animation package

Posted Jul 13, 2007 5:35 UTC (Fri) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

Depends on the output format - PNG supports the alpha channel, but ffmpeg doesn't seem to, nor does the OpenEXR one.

I can't stress enough that we need more developers - the app is still quite buggy even after dooglus fixed a ton of bugs. It is still very slow and needs someone to work out how to optimise it.

I encourage everyone reading this article to take a look at the code and come to the meeting.

(pabs, one of the project admins/developers)