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.
I can't help but feel a little annoyed at the suggestion that we deprecate this feature. You didn't do your research. Gimp will begin shipping a useful cli executable in future versions; the script will work well on windows then with slight modifications. The extension USES GIMP to create the XCF (thus the requirement for a cli version of Gimp) and so does not violate the wishes of the Gimp developers, who seemed quite happy to assist me in writing the script-fu to make it work. Lastly, the script was written as an experiment to smooth workflow between Gimp and Inkscape. XCF is the appropriate format for this task not PSD.
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.
Extensions can use any language, so it makes sense to use the language you are most comfortable in.
Aaron Spike