Working with pictures in Synfig

Hello students, welcome to Kwickprep. You have imported a photo of a friend. Can you make just the head nod, without redrawing anything? Yes. Today we will work with pictures in Synfig Studio, cutting, arranging and animating them.

Let us begin with a short reminder. File, Import brings a picture into Synfig. The picture arrives as its own layer in the layers panel. When you select it, its parameters appear in the params panel. Like any layer, it can be moved, resized and animated.

Most scenes start with a background picture. Import the background first, like a photo of a village road. Resize it so it covers the whole canvas, with no empty edges. Keep it at the very bottom of the layers panel, so everything else is drawn in front. Try not to select it by mistake while you work on other layers.

Now the key tool, the cutout tool. It cuts out one part of a picture and makes it a separate layer. Select the picture layer, choose the cutout tool, and click points around the part you want, like a head. Close the shape by clicking the first point again. The rest of the picture is hidden in that copy, not deleted from your file.

Here is how to make the head nod. First, import the photo. Next, use the cutout tool to cut out the head and the body as separate layers. Add a rotate layer above the head, inside a group, with its origin at the neck. Animate the angle from zero to fifteen degrees and back to zero. Finally, preview the nod.

Pause and predict. The rotate layer's origin is placed at the top of the head, not the neck. The angle goes from zero to fifteen degrees. What does the head do? It swings around its top, so the neck moves away from the body. The origin is the pivot point, so place it where the part really bends.

Let us look at the main picture parameters. Top left sets one corner of the picture's box. Bottom right sets the opposite corner. Amount sets the opacity, from zero to one. Blend method sets how it mixes with the layers below. Gamma adjustment changes how bright or dark the picture looks.

This style is called cut out animation. The picture of a character is split into parts, like head, arms and legs. Each part is a layer with its own pivot point. You rotate the parts over time to make the character move. It is just like a paper puppet, joined with pins, that you move by hand.

You can also combine pictures with effect layers. A blur layer above the background makes it soft, so the characters stand out. A colour correct layer changes the hue or brightness, for example to turn day into evening. Animate the amount of a second picture on top to crossfade from one picture to the other. As always, keep effects inside groups so they touch only the right picture.

Here is a simple crossfade slideshow, with picture two above picture one. At zero seconds, picture one is visible and picture two is invisible. At two seconds, nothing has changed yet. By three seconds, picture two has faded fully in, covering picture one. At five seconds, picture two is still showing.

Let us fix common problems. If a picture shows as missing, the file was moved or renamed, so put it back. If a picture is blurry, it was enlarged too much, so import a bigger one. If a picture is hidden, check the layer order and the show checkbox. If the whole scene moves, you selected the wrong layer, so press control and Z to undo.

Let us revise what we learned today. The background picture stays at the bottom of the layers panel. The cutout tool turns one part of a picture into its own layer. Place the pivot point where the part really bends. Animate amount to fade or crossfade pictures. And keep picture files together with the project.