Alan Horkan wrote:
I'm actually pretty excited about the possibility of using Inkscape to do more-or-less traditional, cel style animation. One tedious bit, though, is the outputting of the individual png frames. Would it be possible to write a script or a plug-in that would do that as a batch? So, you'd have background layer plus layer 1 output as 000000.png, background plus layer 2 as 000001.png, and so on? If so, where would I go to learn how to write such a script or plug-in?
If you know python I'd head right over to the gimp_xcf.py script located in inkscape/share/extensions for an example. This particular script only functions on linux because of the way it uses the gimp cli,
I'd be surprised if the working only on linux issue could not be resolved if someone had the time and interest to look into it more closely.
It is a shame XCF was never standardised but the gimp developers do discourage other programs from implementing XCF so Inkscape should probably take that advice and "deprecate" it. If you could export to a/the defacto standard format like PSD it would offer plenty more options when it comes to software for animating those layers.
If you are willing to run linux to get the XCF export working then you could use the gimp animation package to create an animation from the XCF file and there might be some good integration possibilities there which could really streamline the workflow.
but the png export portion should work fine in windows. If you don't do python, what language do you want to use?
The python extensions are working in 0.44 pre 2 so it would make sense to use python.
Thanks for the replies. Sorry it took so long for me to get back to this, but I was house sitting for a while. And when I got back, I switched to Ubuntu Linux, so you can disregard the Windows limitations now. :D
I plan to try some walk tests this evening with Inkscape and Stopmotion. By this weekend, I hope to get back into figuring out how to streamline the multi-png thing, once I have a better handle on exactly what my needs are.
Oh, and my ultimate goal is to output these animations for DVD. I'm not looking to do web animations (a la animated .gifs or anything like that). Just in case that matters.
Again, thanks for the guidance.
Matt Jordan