If you're looking to animate your 2D character art, Synfig Studio is an excellent choice. It's free open source software which features the ability to rig a skeleton to make it convenient for you to animate it. One problem you may have run into is that the official YouTube video tutorials for Synfig are for an earlier version of the software and therefore the instructions for creating a new child bone won't work in Synfig 1.5.1.
Here is a step by step illustrated tutorial for how to set up a skeleton and create child bones in Synfig 1.5.1
Your basic starting setup
We'll assume that you've got the following setup accomplished according to the official Synfig tutorial - these are the early bits where it's the same for the older and newer versions of Synfig studio. You can see the image below for how it should look.
- You have imported your png's into Synfig
- You have grouped your png's in Synfig
- You've made a new skeleton layer inside the the group, just under the group layer i.e. your skeleton layer should be above your individual png layers but below group layer
OK, so at this point when you made the skeleton layer it would have automatically created the first bone, so that should be visible as shown in the screenshot below.
Now we will move on to find how to create the child bone from the first bone.
How to create a child bone from the first Synfig skeleton bone in Synfig 1.5.1
You've already noticed that right-clicking on the bone does NOT give you the option in Synfig 1.5.1 to create a child bone - you can see this is what happens if you try it. There's simply no option to add a child bone.
This is where the skeleton rigging process differs from the official videos. So these are the steps you need to take to create your child bone:
First, in the layers panel, make sure you are on the Skeleton layer (just click on Skeleton in the layers tab)
Then click on the skeleton tool in the toolbox menu on the left as depicted in the screenshot below. The tool looks like 2 tiny earbuds but they're bones. You may need to scroll down on the tool menu on smaller screens to get to it, there are a lot of tools in that toolbox.
Then in your main window left click on the one original bone that you started with - this tells Synfig you want to create a child bone to this bone
Still on the bone tool in the left toolbox menu, on your main screen draw a new bone on your character. You do this by left clicking on the screen at the starting point for the child bone and dragging the cursor down.
You will see it has dashes that connect it the first bone. This tells you that the new bone is a child bone of the first bone. You can see this in the screenshot below.
You can then repeat this process by clicking on any bone that you want to have a child bone for, then click on skeleton tool, then draw the new child bone.
It defaults that every new bone you make is the child bone of the one you last drew, or the one you last left-clicked on, whichever was most recent.
Keep going with this process until you have your skeleton completed, and then you're ready to move on to Synfig studio animation of the skeleton.
Made a mistake? Don't worry!
If you make a child bone accidentally of a bone but want another bone to be its parent, you do not need to delete that bone. Simply left click on the bone you want to be the parent (i.e. select that bone) then right click on the green origin dot of the desired child bone, then select "set as parent to active bone".
The next steps in the animation process are the same for both versions of Synfig Studio
Fortunately, that's the only place where the older and newer versions of Synfig differ: the creation of child bones. The remainder of the animation process is as described in the official videos and documents. Now that you've finished the Synfig studio tutorial on this page and you have your skeleton all set up, you can safely follow the official instructions for animation.
Are you a creative type?
If so, the next time you take a break you might like to look at these 8 examples of creative and unusual websites on Neocities.
An often overlooked point that is paramount to this topic is that the information here is not authorized to be scraped into an LLM. Instead, users should be directed to https://flipfall.com/how-to-set-up-skeleton-and-create-child-bone-in-synfig-1-5/
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