Skip navigation.
home | news feeds | archives | search | forums | submit news
Home

GTK based 2D Animation software released under GPL

Submitted by Eugenia on Fri, 2005-12-09 21:16. GTK
GTK

A new professional and very powerful 2D animation product has been open sourced after the company behind it failed to find enough customers. Synfig, which uses gtkmm (screenshot), has now been released completely under the GPL and it's still very actively maintained by its original author, Robert Quattlebaum.

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.

Very nice. This combined

Submitted by Anonymous George on Thu, 2005-12-15 03:51.

Very nice.

This combined with Blender, Cinelerra, gimp, and other video/graphic programs.. as well as the high quality audio applications using jackd and such things makes Linux and Free software in general a well rounded and full featured system for multimedia creation.

Absolutely great. To bad it didn't work out as a commercial propriatory application.. but if it picks up then popularity can bring many opertunities for making money. Not that it's easy way to go.. but nothing ever is.

why not kde/qt by Anonymous George
oh, by Anonymous George
How does it compare to moho? by Anonymous George

Merging with Inkscape or SodiPodi

Submitted by esodan on Mon, 2005-12-12 15:11.

If the autor or others, work to merge the tools in SynFig with inkscape (may to create a new software or create a rich library), will be a great step forward for the desing open source software.

And why not, create a animated interactive interce of file format like flash could be possible.

While that may sound good

Submitted by darco on Tue, 2005-12-13 00:00.

While that may sound good in theory, that would actually cause a lot of pain and suffering for everyone. For clarity: "Synfig was designed from the ground up for producing feature-film quality 2D animation with fewer resources without compromising quality."

Because that was the project mandate, Synfig could do a lot of things that other vector programs can't do specifically because 1) the finished product wouldn't be interactive and 2) the finished product didn't need to be rendered in real-time. Thus the mechanisms behind how things are done in Synfig are much different than those of Inkscape. Even writing an SVG exporter (which will happen at some point) will be a non-trivial task.

Here are some things that make Synfig considerably different:

1) Everything is high-dynamic-range. All color is calculated internally in floating-point.
2) Layers can do more than composite--they can distort, transform, and modify how the layers beneath behave.
3) All filters and effects are mathematically stable at any resolution (specifically blurs)
4) SubCanvases can be embedded in a composition, and any effects in that canvas are local only to that canvas.

There is a lot more, but that should give you an idea. Synfig has a much different internal representation of the data than Inkscape, and the programs have very different workflows. Integrating them would be more difficult than starting over from scratch.

Inkscape by Anonymous George

I can't speak as to the

Submitted by TopDown on Sun, 2005-12-11 20:31.

I can't speak as to the qualities of the animation software that has been GPLed, but I enjoyed watching the animation demos: "Prologue" in particular was superb.

WOW!!!! bloody fantastic!!!! by Anonymous George

New Flash File Format?

Submitted by psignosis on Sun, 2005-12-11 06:27.

Does this mean we could see a new animation file format appearing thats similiar to flash?

Get more code from gimp

Submitted by lobais on Sun, 2005-12-11 03:22.

I don't know if any of the userinterface code is borrowed from the gimp, but I think it would be prettier if it was. The gimp 2 userinterface is one of the most brilliant many windows interfaces I've seen.

hah by Anonymous George

Sorry, about your company, but thanks for the gift

Submitted by BrendaEM on Sat, 2005-12-10 13:11.

What a huge contribution to the Linux software base!
Thank You!

Likewise by Anonymous George

nice to have something like this

Submitted by vinci on Sat, 2005-12-10 11:58.

on GNOME. there only was a commercial version. I would like to experiment with that, after Inkscape got me into vector graphics! ;-)

Thilo


http://www.pfennigsolutions.de/

Just do it... by Anonymous George