Los geht's

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Einführung

Wenn Du Synfig Studio startest erscheinen die folgenden Fenster:

Default interface layout of Synfig Studio

Die Hauptkomponenten der Synfig Studio Oberfläche sind:

• Werkzeugkasten — ist das Hauptfenster von Synfig Studio. Wenn Du dieses Fenster schließt beendet sich das Programm. Es enthält das System Menü und einige Knöpfe, Werkzeuge und mehr um Deine Zeichnungen zu erstellen und zu bearbeiten.
• Animation — hier werden Deine Animationen und Zeichnungen dargestellt.
• Anzeigen — enthält Werkzeuge und Informationen über bestimmte Elemente Deines Projekts. Einige Anzeigen erlauben Dir diese Elemente sogar zu verändern.

Note Wenn Deine Synfig Studio Oberfläche anders aussieht gibt es eine Möglichkeit dieses Aussehen einfach wieder herzustellen. Im "Datei" Menü des Werkzeugkastens wähle "Anzeigen → Fenster auf Originallayout zurücksetzen".

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Das Fenster in der Mitte wird Animationsfenster genannt. Jedes mal wenn Du Synfig Studio startest wird ein neues Animationsfenster geöffnet. Dieses Fenster stellt die Basisanimation dar, was das bedeutet ist für Dich momentan noch unklar, aber das ist in Ordnung — wir wollen Dich ja nur ein wenig herumführen. In der oberen linken Ecke des Animationsfensters des Animationsfensters siehst Du einen Knopf mit einem Winkel. Wenn Du auf diesen Winkelknopf klickst wird das Animationsfenster Menü erscheinen. (Übrigens, wenn Du auf dem Animationsbereich rechts klickst und unter dem Mauszeiger ist keine Ebene erscheint dieses Menü auch.) So, nun weißt Du wo das wichtigste Animationsmenü ist, einfach im Animationsfenster. Gut.

Die anderen beiden Fenster (eines unten, das andere rechts) sind anpassbare Leisten. Jede Leiste enthält einige Anzeigen, horizontal oder vertikal angeordnet. Einige Anzeigen teilen sich denselben Platz in der Leiste und man kann zwischen ihnen umschalten inden man auf ihre Reiter klickt. Du kannst die Inhalte der Leisten beliebig verschieben indem Du den Anzeigenreiter verschiebst wohin Du willst. Du kannst sogar eine neue Leiste erstellen indem Du einen Reiter neben eine Leiste ziehst.

Wenn Du versehentlich eine Anzeige geschlossen hast (durch herausziehen aus der Leiste und schließen der neue erstellten Leiste), kein Problem. Benutze einfach den Werkzeugkasten, wähle "Datei → Anzeigen" im Werkzeugkasten Menü und klicke auf den Namen der benötigten Anzeige.

Die wichtigsten Anzeigen sind:

• Ebenen — Diese Anzeige zeigt Dir die Hierarchie der Ebenen in Deiner aktuellen Animation. Es erlaubt Dir auch diese Ebenen zu ändern.
• Parameter — Diese Anzeige zeigt Dir die Parameter der selektierten Ebene. Wenn mehrere Ebenen selektiert sind werden nur die gemeinsamen Parameter angezeigt.
• Werkzeugoptionen — Diese Anzeige zeigt Dir die Parameter des gerade aktiven Werkzeugs.
• Navigator — Dies zeigt ein Überblicksbild der aktuellen Navigation. Du kannst hereinzoomen und den Ausschnitt damit wählen.
• History — Dies ziegt Dir die gespeicherte Historie der derzeitigen Komposition. Du kannst die Aktionen in der Historie verändern.

Es gibt viele unterschiedliche Anzeigen in Synfig Studio. Wenn Du nicht weißt was eine Anzeige macht, dann halte einfach den Mauszeiger über sie und eine Beschreibung ihrer Funktion wird angezeigt.

Was steckt unter der Haube?

Synfig Studio, wie die meisten ernstzunehmenden Grafikprogramme, legt die individuellen Elemente einer Animation in Ebenen ab. Aber es unterscheidet sich von anderen Programmen in zwei wesentlichen Punkten:

Layers Panel

1. Eine Ebene in Synfig repräsentiert normalerweise ein einzelnes "Primitive". Z.B. eine einzelne Region, eine Umrandung einer Region, ein importiertes Bild, usw.

Dies gibt Dir weitreichende Flexibilität und Kontrolle. Für eine Komposition ist ducchaus üblich hunderte von Ebene zu haben (natürlich durch den Benutzer sinnvoll hierarchisch organisiert).

1. Eine Ebene kann nicht nur XXX A layer can not only composite information on top of the image below it, but also distorts and/or modify it in some other way. In this sense, Synfig's Layers act much like filters do in Adobe Photoshop or the GIMP. For example, we have a Blur Layer, Radial Blur Layer, Spherize Layer, Color Correct Layer, Bevel Layer, etc...

Each layer has a set of parameters which determine how it behaves. When you click on a layer (either in the canvas window, or in the illustrated Ebenenanzeige), you will see its parameters in the Params Panel.

Synfig Studio has an autorecovery feature. If it crashes, even if the current file has not been saved, it will not lose more than 5 minutes of work. At restart it will automatically prompt the user to recover the unsaved changes. Unfortunately history isn't recovered yet.

Development Notes:

You may find that Synfig Studio is SLOW, making it practically unusable on hardware that is over 3 years old even if it behaves acceptably on recent hardware. The biggest reason for this is that all of the color calculations are done in floating point — to enable High-Dynamic-Range Imaging.

HOWEVER, some major re-implementations and optimizations are to be made that should quite dramatically improve the performance of Synfig on all platforms. The goal is not a 200% speed increase, but at least a 2000% speed increase. Currently there is a work in progress in development branch implementing those optimization via OpenGL. It already shows very promising results, but is not ready for usage yet.

First steps

Let's create something fun so that we can play with it!

First, go over to the toolbox and click on the Kreis-Werkzeug (if you don't know which one it is, just mouse over them until you find the one with the tooltip that says "Circle Tool").

When you click on the circle tool, you should notice that the Tool Options Panel changed. But we'll get to that later.

Note Some users might experience the following problem: when you click-drag on the canvas using the Circle Tool, either nothing seems to happen or you end up making insanely huge circles. This is a known problem. To fix this go to "File → Input Devices" and disable all the devices you can find there (such as Macintosh mouse button emulation or USB Optical mouse). If you have an extended input device that you want to use, such as a pressure-sensitive pen, then enable it in this screen. After this change Synfig will work as expected.

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With the Circle Tool selected, you can now create circles in the Canvas Window. This works as you might expect — click on the canvas, drag to change length of the radius, and release the mouse button when you are done. Go ahead and create two circles (or more, if you fancy). If you accidentally release the mouse button before dragging, you end up creating a circle with 0 radius and it is effectively invisible! No need to worry, you can easily fix this. In the Params Panel, you can change the parameters of the selected object. If you just made a 0 radius circle, it should be the current selected object. You can change its radius to some value other than 0, say 10, and manipulate it to your liking with the canvas ducks later.

Now go back to the toolbox and click on the Transform Tool (the blue circle with the arrow on it). After you do this, click on one of your circles. You will then see a Bounding box (which is kind of useless at this point in time, but I digress), a green dot at the center, and a cyan dot on the radius. Those dots are called ducks. If you want to modify the circle, grab a duck and drag it around. Easy!

You can select a Layer by clicking on it. If you want to select more than one layer, hold down Ctrl key while you are clicking — this works in both the Canvas Window and the Ebenenanzeige. Try it!

You can also select multiple ducks. You can do this in several ways. First, you can hold down Ctrl and individually click the ducks that you want selected, but this can be tedious. However, there is a much faster method — just create a selection box by clicking the mouse and dragging it over the area of ducks that you want selected.

Go ahead, select two circles and select all of their ducks. With several ducks selected, moving one duck will move all of the ducks. This behavior is dependent on the Transform Tool. Thus, a more descriptive name for this tool might have been the "move" or "translate" tool.

The rotate and scale tools work much like the Transform Tool, except in the case where you have multiple ducks selected. It is much easier to just try it than read about it. Select a few circles, select all of their ducks, and try using the rotate and scale tools.

Note that, duck manipulation tools have options associated with them. If a particular tool isn't doing what you want, take a look in the Tool Options Panel to see if it is set up the way you want.

Linking

Now let's try linking. Let's say we always want these two circles to be the same size. Select two circles, and then select both of their radius ducks (the cyan dots).

To select multiple ducks, either drag a rectangle around them, or select the first one, then hold the Ctrl key while selecting the rest. Once you have the two radius ducks selected, right click on either duck and a menu will pop up. Click on "Link". Boom. The parameters are linked together. You can prove it to yourself by selecting just one of the circles and changing its radius — the other one will change as well. Neat stuff, eh?

Linking is a fundamental concept in Synfig. You can create links not only between ducks, but also between parameters as well by selecting multiple layers, right clicking on the parameter in the param tab, and selecting "Link".

Digression This is how outlines are attached to their regions — but I'm getting ahead of myself. At the moment, the fundamental power and flexibility of linking in Synfig Core is beyond what Synfig Studio currently allows for. This will change in the future. Anyway, back on track...

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Color selection

Let's say you want one of the circles to be a different color. If you look in the toolbox below the tools, you'll see the outline/fill color selector, the outline width selector, and some other stuff like the default blend method and gradient. The outline/fill color widget works exactly as you might expect — you can click on the fill color, and a modest color chooser will appear. Now to can change the color pretty easily.

But sometimes you just want to click on a color and go. This is where the palette editor tab comes in. Its functionality isn't quite 100% yet (ie: saving and loading custom palettes hasn't been implemented yet), but the default palette is pretty decent. Click on the Palette Editor panel tab and have a look — it's the one with the palette-ish looking icon. Clicking on colors with the left mouse button will immediately change the default outline color and clicking with the middle mouse button will change fill color.

That's all great, but we still haven't changed the color of the circle. There are three ways to do this. The first is to select the circle layer you want to modify, go to the Params panel and double-click on the "Color" parameter. A color selector dialog will then show up, and you can just tweak away. But let's say you already selected your color as the default fill or outline color. Then you can right-click on the Color parameter in the Params panel and select "Apply Fill Color" or "Apply Outline Color" at you preference. Finally, you can just click on the "Fill Tool" from the toolbox, and then click on the circle in the canvas window. Boom. Circle changes color. This works with more than just circles, but we'll get to that in a sec.

Try playing around with the circles for a bit. Muck around with the parameters, and see what happens. To get you started, try out to set the Feather Parameter to 5.

Digging deeper

Of course, so far you just found out how to use the basic features of Synfig Studio but not how you animate a drawing. This is covered in the next chapter.