The detailed and easy-to-follow instructions are completely in English. Complete packages of the current stable release are available on the Synfig homepage for most popular distributions. Since then, the community has continuously developed the software so that new updates appear regularly. When commercial success was still not in sight by 2005, he published the source code as an open source product under the GNU Public License. Several years ago, Robert Quattlebaum authored the Synfig Studio animation software and tried to sell it. Variable background music is set using the sound layer.įigure 5: The limited functionality of Pencil makes it very easy to use. The camera layer defines the visible part of the image for each point in time. The only difference is that the software saves the images as vectors instead of pixels, which does not always work well when using the paint bucket to fill in areas. Interestingly, the vector graphics layer uses the exact same toolbox (Figure 4). Beyond that, you can import external graphics files. In the bitmap layer, the standard instruments (e.g., pencil, line tool, or paint bucket) are available for drawing images. Each of these layers has its own timeline, so you can set what will be shown when for each output layer. In Pencil, animations are edited on four layers: bitmap graphics, vector graphics, camera, and sound output. The latest version is dated 2008, but the programmer recently announced that he has resumed development of a new version. The project provides a well-structured and easy-to-understand guide, but this software also is not the newest. Pencil is available for download in the package sources of common distributions.

Pencil animation program