Flower Tutorial Hick Up (AVERTED)
Update!
Genete, one of the Synfig Gods and all around great guy, did some research and found out that there is a glitch that’s broke with the new version and they are looking into repairing it. I’ve been following Genete’s brilliance since my early Moho days. I can’t thank him enough for taking the time out to check this out.
This is how it all began
Friday night while normal people are out having a drink with friends to celebrate the start of the weekend, I end up sitting around reading the manual and trying out the tutorials for Synfig. I completed the tutorial a while back and was able to move through the material quickly.
Friday though, I had a major hick up while trying to breeze through the flower animation. In the tutorial you’re tasked with creating a sprout that buds and turns into a full-fledged flower. In the past, I was able to finish this tutorial in under an hour. Friday, I couldn’t get past the bud part of the tutorial. It was really frustrating and I couldn’t figure out if it was me or something with the software. I’m assuming it was user error, but it wasn’t something that I could get over.
When you create the bud, you’re learning how to suppress nodes while animating. The concept is incredible and in the past, I was able to go through the steps without a hitch. On Friday, when I created the additional nodes they ended up locked in position instead of animating with the stem dynamically. In the next step you click on a point in the timeline, select the newly added nodes and turn them off. It suppresses the nodes until you want to make them active. Cool stuff! This part worked perfectly. It was just early when I added nodes to the shape while in animation mode, the nodes didn’t respond dynamically.
I tried researching to see if anyone else had this issues and there was one person. I found a thread that was started and tried replying. Plus, I mentioned it in another thread that I created. So far I haven’t heard back. Hopefully someone will be able to explain why this happened. (Genete was great and check into the matter.)
Here is the post on the Synfig forum where a user explains the issue along with visuals.
I want to make sure if there’s some loophole that needs to be mentioned for newbies, it’s added. I would hate for people to try the second tutorial, get frustrated and never pick it up again. That would really suck. The software is really incredible. I don’t even need things like suppressing nodes in my animation right now. I’m sure once I get better versed with Synfig, it will become part of my workflow.
I even had the earlier attempt at the tutorial on my computer. I opened it up to see if I could figure why it worked for me the first time. I came up with nothing and it was a total time suck.
If you’re just starting out and have the same problem, don’t fret. It’s definitely worth pressing on. If you have the same issue or know what I’m doing wrong, please write a comment on my blog. It will help all of us newbies.
I’m going to add a terminology entry to help people and myself get the terminology down. A couple of days ago I posted a some notes for creating a cut-out character. I couldn’t make heads or tails of some of the language. The notes were right but I was confused. Hopefully people will find the entry useful.
More soon!
