Tutorial
In this tutorial you will learn how to drive your animation project using “RenderChan”. By following this tutorial step-by-step you will get your first very simple animation short done with “RenderChan”.
wget https://github.com/morevnaproject/RenderChan/archive/master.zip
or
git clone https://github.com/morevnaproject/RenderChan.git
Next step – make sure you have all requirements installed. To successfully run “RenderChan” and complete this tutorial you will need:
make (http://www.gnu.org/software/make/)
“Make” is a utility that controls the generation of non-source files from the project’s source files. “RenderChan” uses it to detect which files in the project were changed and need to be re-rendered. Typically “make” provided by all Linux distributions – just install corresponding package.
blender (http://www.blender.org/)
“Blender” is the free open source 3D content creation suite. It is also have simple, but very powerful Video Sequence Editor used by “RenderChan” for editing footage. Make sure that your version of “blender” is compiled with FFMpeg support. You can download FFMpeg-enabled “blender” binaries from the official website or get rpm/deb packages here (recommended).
synfig (http://synfig.org/)
“Synfig” is a powerful, industrial-strength vector-based open-source 2D animation software package, designed from the ground-up for producing feature-film quality animation. You can get precompiled binaries of “Synfig” form the official website.
When you get all require software installed, make sure all the mentioned tools are accessible through your system path.
Let’s take a look at the contents of the ‘tutorial’ directory.
As mentioned above, there’s a ‘project.conf’ file. Its contents defines a global settings for the project, such as image width, height and animation FPS. You should edit those values before you start any work on the project. For now we plan to stick with 16:9 aspect ratio, so default values (480×270, 24 FPS) are fine for working with footage without spending much time on rendering.
All your rendered footage will be stored in the ‘render/’ subdirectory. Please don’t put any sources files there, as they can be removed anytime.
Every animation project is planned by storyboard. Storyboard images are stored in the ‘storyboard’ subdirectory. Storyboard splits animation into shots. Shots are numbered: first is 010, second is 020, third is 030 and so on. That scheme is made just in case if later you will want to insert new shot between, say, 020 and 030. Then the name of your new shot will be 025 and you will keep good sorting order. Though, nothing will go wrong if you will use your own naming scheme.
Our animation will have only one single shot and we already have storyboard image for it – it’s ‘storyboard/010.jpg’.
At this image we see moving background and something bouncing on the ground (I really hope you could see that on this draft).
Opening and closing credits for the animation are stored in the ‘credits/opening’ and ‘credits/closing’ subdirectories. There is already have some basic credits there, we’ll look at them later. project.blend
This is the main project file with video sequence where everything (shots, credits, music, sound-fx) composed together.