A new version of open-source 2D animation software Synfig Studio is available to download.

Synfig 1.2.0 ships with a new rendering engine built from the ground up with ‘optimization’ in mind. The rewrite also introduces an ‘advanced task-based architecture’ that delivers ‘significant speedup for bitmap and vector elements, full multithreading and also reduces memory usage’.

Memory comparisons with earlier versions of the software show notable gains.

Elsewhere, integration with open-source Papagayo lipsync software allows budding animators to match mouth shapes to recorded dialogue, a feature that is demoed in this Synfig tutorial:

Other changes include a new-look preferences window, a new zoom level widget, tooltips on the group transformation widget, and various bug fixes.

You can learn more about this release in this announcement post from the Morevna project.

To download Synfig Studio 1.2.0 for Windows, macOS or Linux just follow the links on the official website. This will point you to a pay-what-you-want page but, if you don’t wish to donate to support the project, you can skip this to grab a direct download link.