Welcome to the Spoken Tutorial on “Animate a toy train” using Synfig.
In this tutorial, we will learn to animate the toy train which we created earlier.
For this tutorial, I am using: Ubuntu Linux 14.04 OS, Synfig version 1.0.2
Let’s open our Train Synfig file.
Please open your Train Synfig file which you saved on your system.
Let us start with the animation.
Click on the drop down list of Engine group layer.
Right-click on any of the Wheel group layer.
Select the Star layer.
Again right-click and click on New layer.
Then click on Transform and on Rotate.
Now the Rotate effect has been applied to the wheel.
Move the anchor point to the centre of the wheel.
In the Animation panel, click on Turn on animate editing mode icon.
Type 24 in the Current frame box.
Go to the Parameters panel.
Double-click on the value of Amount parameter and change the value to 360.
Observe that waypoints are created on the Time track panel.
Click and drag the Time cursor between the 2 waypoints and check the rotation of the wheel.
Save the file by pressing Ctrl + S.
Let us now create a time loop for this rotation effect.
Right-click on Rotate effect layer and click on New layer.
Then click on Other and on Time Loop.
In the Parameters panel, tick the checkbox of Only For Positive Duration.
Next, let us add the Rotate & Time Loop effects to all the wheels.
So, select both the effect layers using the Shift key.
And press Ctrl and C keys to copy the layers.
Now, click on the dropdown list of Wheel-1 group layer.
Press Ctrl and V keys to paste the layers.
Repeat the same process for all the wheels.
Now the rotation effect has been applied to all the wheels of the toy train.
Save the file once again by pressing Ctrl + S.
Let us now animate the train.
Select all the group layers except Rail.
Group them together and rename the group layer as Train.
Make sure that the Time cursor is in the zeroth frame.
Using Shift key, drag the train outside the canvas to the right.
Move the Time cursor to the 100th frame.
Using Shift key, drag the train to the left side outside the canvas.
Click on Turn off animate editing mode icon.
Save the file by pressing Ctrl + S.
Let us now render the animation.
For this, go to File and click on Render.
In the File name field, change the extension to avi and change the Target to ffmpeg.
Increase the quality to 9 and click on the Render button.
Now go to Desktop. Right click on the avi file and play using Firefox web browser.
We can now see the Toy train animation.
With this, we have come to the end of this tutorial.
Let us summarize. In this tutorial, we learnt to animate a Toy train.
Here is an assignment for you-animate the bus created in an earlier assignment by following the steps shown in this tutorial.
Your completed assignment should look like this.
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