Last time I tried synfig, the program was both confusing and buggy to the extreme - leaving me with the impression of an interesting piece of software of little practical use. Synfig is free and opensource (GPL) like Blender.
Today, I decided to try synfig again and came away very, very impressed. Featurewise, this is already the Blender of the vector animation world. Once you understand how properties are linked together, the layer system works and experience the animation of the bsplines, you’ll realise how powerful this software is.
The first time round, I saw the animations and was skeptical mainly because of frequent crashes and complete confusion. Now I understand how very possible these animations would be to create on a stable version of synfig:
http://www.bridgetone.com/voria/movies/prologue.mov
http://www.bridgetone.com/voria/movies/wolf.mov
http://www.bridgetone.com/voria/movies/eye.mov
Like Blender this software has commercial roots but is now under GPL. Like Blender it is powerful but unlike Blender it doesn’t yet have the strong user base it deserves. Synfig seems to be having trouble finding developers and taking off.
For those of you willing to try it, let me share with you what I discovered - like gimp, synfig uses right click menus. Everything in synfig is based on layers (effects, objects, everything) and groups of layers (encapsulated). Everything is animatable (and I mean everything) - every vertex on a bspline can be keyframed. Anyway, if you have any questions, I’ll help where I can.
Quite frankly, I am simply blown away. Along with freestyle, I haven’t seen such a deserving piece of software in a long time. Please support synfig, it is awesome.
Here is the windows build I used. It is *almost *stable enough to work with and you should be saving often anyway: :rolleyes:
Koba.
P.S> I am considering posting this on “News and Chat” cause the “Other Software” forum gets little love. I really feel strongly about giving great OSS software attention. What do you think?
P.P.S> There are a couple of synfig threads on blenderartists already - none of which where people say what they think of it. I hope this program gets stable and grows a userbase.
EDIT: It is such a shame the drawing tools were taken out (can be enabled but very buggy). It supported tablet too! A stable synfig with the draw tool - animation nirvana!