GIMP Motion: part 1 — basic animations

Mid-July, we finally published publicly the code of GIMP Motion, our software for animations in GIMP. It is available on GIMP official source code repository under the same Free Software license (GPL v3 and over).

We don’t have a public GIMP release containing this plugin yet. Hopefully it should happen soon, but the code is still much too experimental and incomplete. We are using it daily internally and you are welcome to do so as well, but the released version will be much better. 🙂
So it means that for the time being, if you want to play with it, you will have to build it yourself from source, or wait for someone to make a build (we may provide one at some point).

The video above describes some of the base features for simple animations, such as storyboards/animatics and most common needs for animated images (GIF, Webp…).  What we call “simple animations” is when you mostly have several images which you want to succeed at one another. No complex composition with background and character layers for instance. New features will still happen, for instance for panning/tilting/zooming on bigger panels (very common on storyboards as well), and adding various effects (a keyframed blur for instance would be a common movie effect).

We will soon publish a second part video where we will describe the more advanced features for complex animation (the ones with layered background/foreground/characters). Because we just scratched the surface of what we will be able to do with this plugin. 🙂

Have a fun viewing!

ZeMarmot team

Reminder: my Free Software coding can be supported in
USD on Patreon or in EUR on Tipeee.

5 Replies to “GIMP Motion: part 1 — basic animations”

  1. Hi interesting video, but what do you use to “Search action” in gimp?
    I didn’t know this feature and it looks so useful?

    Thanks 😉

    1. Yes that’s a new feature so you can find it only on the development version of GIMP. You won’t find it in current stable GIMP, hence it explains probably why you didn’t know about it. If you ever try a development release of GIMP (we should release a new version in a few days), the default shortcut is ‘/’ (though you can configure it to something else in preferences as any other feature, of course).

      It was originally contributed by some students, then I cleaned this code, integrated it and now maintain it. It is indeed one of my favorite features (I barely ever use menus anymore, if at all, in GIMP thanks to this).

      1. Thanks for the info!
        I’m using Gimp on Debian stable, so not really an uptodate version … but I’ll be watching for this feature!
        IMO that’s a really good feature an i’ll use it too 😉

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