Synfig Studio 1.3.11 released

The new development release of Synfig Studio is here! This build provides a preview of our work towards the next stable version (1.4.0), at its current state. Please consider that many features are still work-in-progress and can behave not as expected. We strongly discourage you from using this version in production. Any bugs found please report to our issue tracker.

List of changes:

Render engine improvements

• Implemented downsampling for image layers. This greatly improves quality if your scene uses big images scaled to smaller size. Unfortunately, this operation demands additional CPU resources and you will notice general application slowdown when working with such scenes. We are working on solution to provide mechanism to avoid the slowdown.Below you can see a sample scene with large images rendered in old and new versions of Synfig.

  

   

  

• Major optimization of parsing scenes with many layers (issue #314).
• Optimizations for Outline Layer, Region Layer, Checkerboard Layer, SuperSample Layer.

Improvements for workarea playback

• Playback cache. Synfig now remembers already rendered frames, which is greatly improves experience of playback and timeline scrubbing.
• Background rendering. Synfig now does background rendering of all frames in current animation and the result of rendering is saved into cache. This allows to achieve very smooth playback and timeline scrub. This feature is enabled by default, but you can disable it with a relevant button on toolbar if you wish to keep your CPU free.

• Hovering on timetrack now displays frame preview.

• Custom playback range and looped playback. Now you can select playback range on the timeline and make playback looped.

• Workarea handles now hidden during playback.
• Playback is stopped when user clicks on timeline (issue #415).

Other features and improvements

• Basic functionality for importing video files. At the current state the system is still too slow to work with large AVI and MP4 videos, but it is already possible to play with animated GIFs (yes, it can import GIF as well).

• Now it is possible to set default background for newly created documents (issue #636). The background can be a solid color or image. You can configure this via “Edit” -> “Preferences” -> “Document”.

• Rendering status is now indicated with a progress bar at Info Panel (issues #383, #626).

• A sound notification is played when rendering is done (issue #648).

• Fixes and changes for onion-skin functionality. Onion-skin functionality was mainly broken since version 1.2.0 – it wasn’t able to display more than on onion-skin layer. Now this ability is restored. At the same time, we have changed functionality of onion-skin: in all previous versions it was linked to keyframes only, now it is set relatively to ordinary frames. We plan to continue improving onion-skin features as part of issue #600.

• Now it is possible to configure color of transparent areas  in Preview Window (issue #636).

• Default render settings: now we use avi format with popular mpeg4 codec by default (issue #464).

• Do not waste space for dropdowns in combo boxes (issue #650).

• When new Text Layer is created, its name is set the same as text content (issue #407).
• Vertex handles now placed above tangent handles (issue #645).
• Color dialog now opens with HSV tab active (issue #672).

• Portable version of Synfig (zip) now writes settings to its own configuration directory (issue #716)

Fixes

• Fixed “No disc in drive” error (issues #489, #724).
• Autosave now enabled by default (issue #657).
• Removed “Cancelled by user” dialog that happens when the user tries to move an animated object (issue #693).
• Fixed incorrect behavior of Draft rendering mode in some circumstances (issue 582).
• Timebar is not hidden anymore for cases when scene is only 1 frame short.
• Fixed issue with incorrect GUI font on some Windows systems (issue #667).
• Fixed issues with incorrect window placement on Windows (issue #523).
• Fixed issue which was preventing to change parameters at some circumstances (issues #659, #526, #520).
• Fixed crash when exported value is set from parameters panel in animation mode (issue #588).
• Fixed crash when user cancels parameter changing (issue #671).
• Disabled scientific notation when displaying numbers (issue #635).