Synfig in motion

Synfig Studio is a free software 2D animation suite; we last looked at it in depth in 2010, when animator Konstantin Dmitriev was pushing its development forward as part of his anime project Morevna. Since then, Dmitriev (who was not an original Synfig developer) has taken on the task of maintaining the application. The latest release is version 0.64.1 from November 2013; it incorporates a number of functional and usability improvements that make Synfig much easier to work with, but Dmitriev and the other team members have also made big strides in funding ongoing development and in producing necessary training materials.

Across the second dimension

When first started, Synfig's user interface bears a strong enough resemblance to other image editors (such as GIMP or Inkscape) that it is not hard to bumble around and figure out many of the basics. There is a drawing canvas, a toolbox (with, for the most part, easily-understood tool icons), and palettes showing image layers, tool options, undo/redo history, and the like. The essence of 2D animation in Synfig, however, is that all of these tools are also tied to a timeline.

When one selects an object on the canvas with the selection tool, a tree view of its properties appears next to the timeline. Each of those properties can be changed at any timecode of the user's choosing: its position, its color, opacity, depth within the z-order of objects, the blending method used to composite it, and so on. Animation is a matter of manipulating these properties for all of the objects on the canvas at the right time; when exporting a scene, Synfig interpolates the changes—hence, we get motion.

Perhaps that broad description sounds simple, but in practice, of course, using it to make animation of watchable quality is not. What separates a good animation tool from a merely mediocre one is how well it streamlines repetitive tasks, groups commonly needed features, and in other ways builds on top of the "primitive" jobs of moving and changing object properties to create tools that an animator can use easily.

On that usability front, Synfig has made considerable progress in last few years. Some of that progress has been made through a process of steady normalization in the user interface: better icons, clearer controls, ensuring that screen elements (buttons, fields, text label, and so on) are consistently aligned and properly sized, and so on. But there have been other important changes, in particular a 2013 coding sprint overhauled a lot of the unusual terminology found in the UI.

For instance, the control handles used in the timeline were previously referred to as "ducks;" they are now just called "handles." As the Synfig wiki points out, the term "duck" has legitimate historical origins, but nevertheless it was a practical obstacle to users trying to learn Synfig. There were also a number of UI terms which had been saddled with names from internal Synfig data structures; they have been renamed in more human-friendly fashion. Some of the other UI improvements include switching to Cairo for rendering (which considerably smooths out visualizing one's work) and documenting keyboard shortcuts in the program's tooltip pop-ups.

Features

UI improvements certainly make it easier to get around in Synfig (whether one is new to the program entirely, or simply hunting for an infrequently used feature), but the project has made progress on important features as well. The most significant addition in 0.64.1 is the application's first implementation of "skeleton layers."

Skeletons or "bones" are a means for the animator to rig up a simple framework of joints for an animated character: handles for each articulation point, and connections linking the points as they are designed to move (e.g., hand-to-elbow-to-shoulder). The "skin" of the character is the visible image, which is attached so that it moves with the skeleton. Right now, Synfig lets animators attach a skin to a skeleton and move it around manually, but there are bigger benefits to be found in the future: with a working skeleton implementation, more advanced motion techniques like inverse kinematics become possible. At this stage, Synfig's bones implementation is still marked as "experimental," and must be switched on in the application preferences.

The other functional changes include the ability to set different default interpolation methods for different parameter types, the ability to scale groups of objects all at once, and a fully zoomable drawing canvas. The interpolation method change is especially valuable because it frees the user from having to repeatedly make the same changes to multiple objects. How a parameter is interpolated between one keyframe and the next can have a big impact on realism. For example, a car moving along the ground can move at a constant speed, but a ball bouncing up and down needs to accelerate and decelerate. Thus, the two types of motion need to have different interpolation functions. Synfig allows animating object properties other than position, of course, but the need for flexibility still applies.

There are several other changes that have more to do with the production process than with animation tools themselves. For example, users can mark an image layer to be excluded from rendering; that feature could be used to speed up render times by just exporting part of an animation, to add mock-up layers as placeholders for future content, and much more.

Another example is a set of improvements to working with keyframes. Keyframes are frames in a sequence where the animator manually makes changes to the canvas; the frames in between keyframes are what is interpolated. In older releases, keyframes could not be disabled; they could only be removed completely. The new releases let users turn each keyframe on or off at will, which can be a big boon when trying to figure out proper motion. The keyframe palette and timeline now show more information about keyframes, and Synfig goes ahead and creates the first keyframe at timecode zero when starting a new project (which is something that every user had to do manually before).

Supporting development

In addition to the changes in the Synfig application code itself, the project has undertaken a concerted effort to fund developer time. In 2013, Dmitriev was awarded a grant from the Shuttleworth Foundation. 60% of the grant money was used for a full-time developer (in addition to Dmitriev, who continued working as his schedule allowed), while the rest went toward producing a series of Synfig training videos.

Producing training materials has been a successful strategy for other creative-suite applications like Blender and Krita, of course, both for attracting users and for providing a revenue source. But it also helps bridge one of the most needed gaps in Synfig adoption. At Libre Graphics Meeting 2013 in Madrid, one may remember, animator Nina Paley expressed considerable frustration with how difficult she found Synfig to learn. In particular, she noted that she needed hands-on training to figure out Synfig, despite her experience with other animation applications. The training videos, then, would seem to address that concern quite nicely.

The first set focuses on "cutout" animation, which is the simplest method to get started with. Cutout animation involves moving static elements on screen, 2D-marionette–style. While Synfig can do much more (in fact, animating vector drawings is Synfig's strong suit), the cutout techniques do allow the viewer to learn the ins and outs of most of the application. The project is currently seeking to translate the narration into a variety of languages; no details for further installments have been announced, but additional courses have been alluded to.

Since the end of the Shuttleworth Foundation grant, Dmitriev has also run a series of one-month crowdfunding campaigns through Indiegogo, with each one underwriting a specific feature set. The amounts have varied according to the chosen feature (and all have been more modest in size than a one-month contract in Silicon Valley would entail), but the project has beat its funding goal on every campaign thus far, which is a noteworthy achievement in its own right.

Synfig still has its share of quirks, of course. Most notable is the "secret menu" that hides the majority of the function menus in the UI. To be perfectly clear, "secret menu" is not my tongue-in-cheek description; that is the actual name of the feature, and it is well-earned, since the menu can only be activated by clicking on an unlabeled triangle between two other UI elements. But the recent progress is considerable, both in usability and in expanding the feature set. The most recent work underwritten by the crowdfunding campaigns has not landed yet, but it will include some important feature enhancements like sound support and single-window mode.

In some ways, Synfig faces an intrinsically uphill battle for user attention merely because so much more emphasis is placed on 3D animation these days. But there is a lot that can be done in two dimensions, as the Synfig training materials demonstrate. Apart from traditional cartoons, a lot of the motion graphics used as illustrations in other video productions are 2D affairs. Currently, Blender is the free-software choice for this type of content (as Jakub Steiner shows), even when 3D is non-essential. At its current pace of development, though, Synfig could soon give Blender a run for its money.