Thorsten Wilms wrote:
Just yesterday I stumbled across http://www.synfig.com/. It's a bit rough on the edges, but a very interesting vector animation app with a resolution independet canvas and a timetrack working with absolute time, not frames like flash does. So for anyone who wants to do animation right now, it should be a much better choice.
Anyone who would like to add animation to Inkscape should have a look at it.
(The only other open source animation app I'm aware of right now is Ktoon, but I havn't checked it out yet)
Cheers, Thorsten Wilms
Thanks for the reply. I actually have synfig and have played with it a tad. I haven't gotten my head around how it works yet, so I'm not sure it'll work for me. The demo animation at the site, which I believe was called "Prologue," was nicely done, but very "vector tweeny." I appreciate that synfig takes that route to streamline production for a small, even one-person, staff. I'm just not sure I want to go that route yet.
I forgot to mention that I'm on XP for the time being. I'm easing toward switching over to Linux, but there's some inertia there. At any rate, I can't try out Ktoon since it isn't available for Windows yet.
One reason why I'm hoping to cobble something together that uses Inkscape is that I've learned how to get a really nice, natural looking ink line in Inkscape. No other software that I've tried, including demos of some of the proprietary stuff, seems to compare. Plus, the workspace in Inkscape, with the appropriate template overlay, looks like an animation board and lends itself well to things like panning a background image - assuming I can solve the precision issue. And for character animation, each stage can obviously be put on its on layer.
I just downloaded a program called Monkey Jam to stitch the pngs together into scenes. I'll play with that some next week. Then, of course, I'd assemble the scenes and add sound and so on in a compositor.
Anyway, I'm still interested in any ideas and suggestions, and I'll keep you all apprised of my progress in case I do something useful.
Thanks again to all who responded.
Matt Jordan