Question on using inkscape and blender

[knight_medek]

Is it possible to make a png or svg animation with blender, move it to inkscape, draw in some 2d stuff, and then finish it up on blender with the final sounds and video? Or would there be a better way to make 2d/3d animations come together?

[◢ k r i s ◤]

There's also Synfig and Natron if you are sticking to FOSS.

I don't know what part of Blender makes you think of svg exporting, but no - I don't think Blender can do that.

[◢ k r i s ◤]

I never heard of it before, but I found this addon while looking up svg plugins for Blender.
https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/render/freestyle/export_svg.html
Is that what you were talking about? I've no experience with it personally, but while it sounds and looks pretty cool I have my doubts that it is practical if your aim is a lot of animation.

[knight_medek]

Oh wait, I think I found something. It's a plug-in. I think I'll try it out. Found a link to it on this site here: https://docs.blender.org/manual/ko/dev/render/freestyle/export_svg.html

[knight_medek]

lol, thanks, just found it too

[knight_medek]

I think I found a good technique now. If the plug in works that is. Heheheh.

[◢ k r i s ◤]

Definitely check out Synfig if your aim is animation. I've used it a couple times before and would probably use it more if I were much into 2D animation. I don't think it can import models or anything, but if you are planning on pre-rendering models to png frames from Blender to use in your animation, then I suppose it -could- work. Synfig is certainly easier to use than Blender for actually creating animations - that's for sure.

[knight_medek]

Yeah, it's just that I prefer Inkscape, since I think it can work with SVG.

[◢ k r i s ◤]

Inkscape is a vector editing program.
Blender is a 3D editing program.
Synfig is a 2D animation program.
Natron is a video compositing toolkit.

There isn't much overlap between them. Depending on your goals, you might actually use all four of them together.

[The Renderer]

knight_medek, you really need to learn about the difference between pixel and vector graphics and when to best use which. What you are saying doesn't make much sense.

[knight_medek]

Oh, yeah. I thought I could draw on Inkscape?

[knight_medek]

Hmm... guess I gotta research more.. argh.

[◢ k r i s ◤]

You do draw vectors with Inkscape. That's it though. You can animate sprites with it if you have a lot of patience, but I think most people use inkscape for still-frame vector editing only. Here is a video that briefly goes through some Inkscape sprite animation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GV0TD_MJNns

You said you wanted to bring 2D animations and 3D animations together. That sounds like you want to make a video file. If so, I think what you will want to do is make your 2D sprites (animated or not) in Inkscape, pre-render your 3D animations from Blender, then composite them with either Synfig or Natron (likely the former) into a video file.

Of course, you never did specify what exactly you are trying to achieve. Animation includes everything from flash SWF to spritesheets to gifs to apng to mp4s - etc. Are you trying to make a video file or just a nifty little svg animation that plays in the browser? If the latter, is that why you wanted svg export from Blender? Vector animation is not a very popular study right now for whatever reason, but if that is your aim then you will just need to familiarize with all of the above until you figure out what it is you need exactly. Perhaps that Freestyle SVG plugin will do most, if not everything, you wanted by itself.

[*P0P$*FR3$H3NM3Y3R*]

Well you can output freestyle ( a line renderer in blender) to .svg, which inkscape can use and edit. The deal is; Inkscape is a vector tool, while blender exports raster images natively. (except for freestyle which can be vectorized on the go)
However Inkscape supports raster image formats, so its absolutely possible to work over exported animation frames from blender in inkscape and then reimport these worked over frames into blenders sequencer and do whatever video sequence editing you like.

Make sure to render your animation to single .png's instead of an encapsuled video format like avi/ h264 or whatever
[HINT: Always render animations to single frames and then just run em through sequencer to put em into a capsuled video files if u need that ]
If u reallyy want to go all out on the 2D edidting save your animation frames to .EXR files, that way you can contain all the renderlayers, the Z-buffer etc. into a single file. EXR are due to filesize more of a professional user format [a 5mb .png can end up a 200mb EXR easily..so large filestacks for animations a gogo]

PM me if u need more info on that..i used both blender and inkscape and I am very sure, one can work out a cross a platform workflow with a proper pipeline.

[knight_medek]

Well, I was trying to figure out if it was possible to put in a technique where I animate the scenery with blender, and have some base models for it in poses. Then, I thought I could just do the rest of the 2d stuff on inkscape. Hmm... anyways, that's what I was thinking anyways.

[knight_medek]

As for sound and stuff, I was gonna add that later.