I was messing around with animation this past week. It’s always been an interesting process to me, and I’ve messed with a few hand-drawn animation apps on the iPad in the past. However, any small skill in drawing left me a long time ago. I also had a particular goal that amounted to animating with a vector image I had built using Inkscape.
Lo and behold, I discovered the concept of vector tweening. It’s essentially an interpolative animation process that takes advantage of the mathematical niceties of vector images. Instead of needing to draw every individual frame, you can “skip” frames. You tell your animation software that at frame 6 your vector assets should look this way, and at frame 12 they should look that way. A little voodoo occurs (which I assume could be tweaked depending on the software), and you get all the frames between 6 and 12 automatically generated.
This was an amazing find. After a bit of searching, I installed Synfig. A few minutes later, I found the ability to save an Inkscape project as a Synfig animation project. In other words, the image I’d created became vector assets that could be animated using this new tool. Within twenty minutes I learned enough basics to make my little animation, and the rest was tediously adjusting points.1You can see the number of control points that get created when you convert text to a vector image in Inkscape. Luckily, I didn’t have to touch those, but moving an object with that many control points does make for a bit of a slow process.
This was a really interesting process. I love getting new tiny tools under my belt, and this is just another I might be able to bank on in the future. Regardless, I had a good time and learned something new about the world.
Footnotes
- 1You can see the number of control points that get created when you convert text to a vector image in Inkscape. Luckily, I didn’t have to touch those, but moving an object with that many control points does make for a bit of a slow process.