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"The Real Way To Use Pivot Stickfigure Animator"

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Wed 09/05/07 at 17:59
Regular
"Cool!"
Posts: 280
This is a tutorial on Pivot Stickfigure Animator, if you don;t have this tool, don't bother reading it. But if you do, read on, and discover many wonderful things about this excellent animation tool! :)

The Interface

That is your interface, you should know that. Just in case you do not know, here are the controls.

Play: View the framees!

Stop: Stop the whole thing.

Repeat: Makes your animation loop.

Scroll Bar: Adjust the speed.

Stickman: After loading a figure, its name will appear here. Click the downward arrow (drop-down bar) to view the list of figures currently loaded. “Stickman” is the default figure.

Add Figure: Add the figure you are playing about with now, so you have two.

Edit: Mess around with your sticman's joints.

Centre: Move your stickan to the middle of screen.

Flip: Turns it the other away, with the same everything.

Colour: Change colour.

100: This shows how big your stickan is. The higher, the bigger.

Front: Make it overlap other things.

Back: Opposite of above sentence.

Next Frane; Click this, then make your stickman move a little, making a smooth animation.

File: You can save and load stuff here.

Options: You can adjsut things here.

Help: You see legal stuff.

Exit: Obvious!


Each stickguy has load sof joints. You can see them, they are red. If you click them, you can move them. The orange dot, which is sometimes known as the origin, moves the whole thingy. If you dont highlight the stickman, it will look blue. If you move a joint, or the whole thing -- you will see grey sutff. This is where the stickman part used to be. Sometimes called draw-back-skin.

It's obvious to save and laod, so i will not go through that!



Creating Models

Click file, then create figure type.
It opens a window which looks like this: the Window I was Taking about

Here are the options:
“Add line”: Create a new line segment to attach to the model.
“Add circle”: Create a new circle segment to attach to your model.
“Toggle segment kind”: Change the segment from a line to a circle, or vice-versa.
“Change segment thickness”: This edits the thickness of separate segments. By setting thickness to 0, you can make “invisible lines”.
“Duplicate segment”: Makes a copy of the highlighted segment, which can then be attached to another segment.
“Static/Dynamic segment”: Dynamic segments can be moved around in animations. Static segments cannot be moved.
“Delete segment”: Removes the highlighted segment from the model.
“File”: Here you can start a new model, open a saved one, save the current model or add the current model to the animation.
“Options”: Here you can undo a mistake made with the model or switch to edit mode.
“Edit mode”: This mode is used to change the length of a line or circle on your model.


Lets Go On

Make sure you get used to Pivot. Make little cool fioghts between two guys, that is a lot of fun. Look at galleries, this is inspiring,


Vital Walking

Walking is really important, it makes your animations look good. So, here is a tutorial, step by step to teach you:
Frame 1: Your stickman is at a standstill, about to move off.
Frame 2: The right arm moves forward slightly, the left moves backward slightly, the origin moves forward slightly, the right leg moves back slightly while still on the ground, the left leg moves forward. The spine leans forward a tiny bit.
Frame 3: Same as frame 2, except the right forearm moves forward slightly more than the right bicep. The left arm stays straight however. The right leg stays on the ground in the exact same place, the left leg rises more, the left foot also rises slightly. The origin moves forward.
Frame 4: Same as frame 3, except the left forearm curves slightly toward the body of the stickman. The origin moves forward.
Frame 5: Same as frame 4, except the left foot touches the ground. The origin moves forward.
Frame 6: The left foot stays where it is, the right thigh comes forward, the right shin goes back, the right foot is still touching where it originally rested, the right forearm keeps curving forward, the right bicep moves back, the left arm moves forward. The origin moves forward.
Frame 7: Same as frame 6, except the right foot leaves where it originally rested and rises into the air. The origin moves forward.
Frame 8: Same as frame 7, except the right shin now moves forward instead of back. The origin moves forward. It is vital that the two legs and arms now cross over each other at angles, to simulate a realistic crossing over of limbs. This part of the walk cycle is probably the most important for realism.
Frame 9: The arms and legs move apart again, continuing their original paths. The origin moves forward.
Frame 10: The left arm moves forward, the right moves backward, the right leg moves back while still on the ground, the left leg moves forward. The origin moves forward.

I'm not bery good, but I found a picture which the ending results should look like: WALKING!!!


Now Running

Running

1: Running is naturally a fast motion. Speed is better than smoothness, but speed results in choppiness. Finding the balance between smoothness and speed is very difficult. In my opinion, 4 frames per stride is the best for speed, and 9 is the best for smoothness. 7 is the best for realism.

2: When running, the camera should be following the stickman. Usually you’d have the arms going back and forth in a moving camera run. You’ll get a normal looking run out of that. However, if you animate running with a stationary camera, you have to find something to do with the arms. To alleviate the choppiness, you can try a masking blur (See my third general tutorial). Also, you could occupy the stickman’s arms with a machine gun or a sword or something; otherwise you get an extremely choppy animation. I’ve seen at least 4 DD elites make this mistake, including me. :P

3: There is a “vital frame” theory for running, or so I call it. Even if you animate running as you imagine it in real life, in most cases it won’t look right in pivot. The most important vital frame is the one where the legs and arms cross over each other. One limb must be angled slightly, while the straight one crosses over it.

4: When running, both feet come off the ground longer than the feet on the ground. Don’t go nuts with this though, otherwise your stickman will look like he’s floating. One frame’s difference is enough.

5: Running adds motion and “cinematic speed” to your animation, which means animations with running in them are better than ones where the stickman is moving around the same space all the time.

6: Keep the stickman leaning forward while running. It makes him look like less of a loser. Yeah.

7: When the front foot slams down onto the ground, make the head bob down slightly on the next frame, and then resume its position the frame after. Also, the spine moves up and down slightly and rythmically while running. Don’t overdo either of these, they’re really just small details if you’re after some shiz running.

8: When the stickman is standing stationary, about to run, lean forward slowly and move the arms less intensely as you would when in full, fast running. Make him crouch slightly on the front knee, and then you can take off into the main running.

9: Download thie running animation I found, and study the frames.

RUN RUN


Combat Cool Techniques

Lets Punch

Punch from a standing start:

Frame 1: Your stickman is at a standstill, legs apart, spine curved, arms loose.
Frame 2: The right arm moves forward, the left bicep moves backward, the left forearm contracts slightly and moves into the bicep. The right leg slides forward on the ground slightly, and the left stays where it is. Both leg’s knees drop slightly, making the stickman crouch.
Frame 3: Same as frame 2, but each movement is more pronounced.
Frame 4: Same as frame 3, but each movement is more pronounced.
Frame 5: Same as frame 4, but every joint except the arms slow down.
Frame 6: Same as frame 5.
Frame 7: The right bicep moves back, but the forearm still moves forward. The left leg is brought forward. The origin rises over the right leg. The left arm is almost folded into one joint. It’s important that you don’t fold them perfectly; otherwise it looks like your stickman has lost half his arm.
Frame 8: The right arm comes back, with the forearm bisecting the torso. The left arm should now be hidden inside the right arm, to suggest that the arm is going straight through the stickman.
Frame 9: The left arm fully extends out, making the punch look explosive and fast. The right elbow is pointed backwards. Don’t ask me why, it just looks the most realistic to have it like that when the punching arm is fully extended.
Frame 10: The punching arm stays extended for one more frame, to emphasise the locked out arm. The rest of the limbs start to drop.

Here is a fantastic example:
Punchy!

Punchy Combos

Frame 1-9: Same as above.
Frame 10-13: You simply repeat frames 7-10, but the right arm drops faster to make way for the left arm to punch.
Frame 14-21: The two arms rotate in a circle, with one arm folding almost double. Have the arms form a vertical line as the left leg crosses over the right leg during the step. Also, the right foot should be rotating backwards to allow for the knee joint to bend. If you don’t animate the foot rotating, your stickman will look reverse jointed, or as if his knee was broken.
Frame 21-26: Move your stickman into a stylish stance

Cool example i foubd
Three Hit Punch



Kicks

Kicks add an athletic type of skill to your fighting animations; however, they’re fairly difficult to animate properly. There are way too many types of kicks for me to animate them all, so I’ll just deal with some of the basic ones, and maybe one technical kick. Here’s how to animate three basic kicks:

Straight Kick:

Frame 1: Your stickman is at a standstill, legs apart.
Frame 2-5: The origin moves forward and down slightly, the arms move apart, the right foot stays where it is, the right knee bends, the left leg comes forward and stays straight. The spine curves back.
Frame 6-10: Pretend the left leg is an arm. Now animate this “arm” as if it was punching. Behold, you just animated a kick. :P As the leg comes to the waist of the stickman, start moving the arms back towards each other, and curve the spine in the opposite direction. When the leg is fully extended, leave it like that for two frames to emphasise its impact.
Frame 11-15: Drop all the limbs and straighten the spine.

Wicked example i found, looks cool:
Kicks


Backgrounds

Background are important, here is soem I found.

Hospital


Forest


Cool Eeffect

Look at this picture:

This Picture

Wouldn't it be nice if the background moves along with the man, to amke it more realistic...like this:

Like This!

What you do is, move the cityscape model left by one pixel every frame, and do the same with the stickman. Your result will look liek the pcutre link above.

ZOOMING

Easing applies to zooming in. The best way to do this is on the first frame, increase the size by one, then 2, then 5, then 10, 15, 20, 25, 35, 50 and so on. Just reverse those figures for when you’re finishing with the zoom movement. Here’s a small example:

ZOOOOOM

With imagination, you'll end up with cool thigns like.......:

Imagination




Bolt Lightning:

The beauty of bolt lightning is that you can just place it for a massive boost to your animation graphically, and there’s no need to animate it degenerating and you can simply delete it when it’s finished. The three best colours of bolts you could use are red, yellow and blue:

To animate a bolt strike:

Frame 1: The area is empty. Select your target(s).
Frame 2: Place the first bolt on the target and apply a tremor effect. The bolt has destroyed the ground around where it hit, so clear the space around where the bolt hit and replace it with debris particles.
Frame 3: Flip the bolt and move it again so that it’s still on the target. Animate the particles flying away.
Frame 4-12: Delete the bolt and finish animating the particles.

You'll end up with:

Bolt...


FIRE-FLAMES

Draw about 15-20 different looking flame models, about the same size but with slightly different changes every time. Choose the object you're setting fire to first of all. On frame 1, have a small spiky flame erupt at the source of ignition.

On frame 2, have the flame burst upward, and animate a few particles of the object breaking off. Also, animate small embers from the fire rising into the air.

On frame 3, have the flame go upward slightly and move randomly. Animate about 5 particles per flame section.

On frame 4 and onward, have the background colours flicker slightly. This gives the illusion of the fire's flickering quality. Repeat frame 3 and have the particles going up slightly and shrinking all the time.

Fire I found


FINALLY.......


Saving in GIF

Click file, then save animation.
You will see...

What you will see

Do the normal sutff, then, the important part, you'll see this.

Important

These are the best settings.

The End! Hope it helped.
Thu 10/05/07 at 17:02
Regular
"Cool!"
Posts: 280
Hello?
Wed 09/05/07 at 17:59
Regular
"Cool!"
Posts: 280
This is a tutorial on Pivot Stickfigure Animator, if you don;t have this tool, don't bother reading it. But if you do, read on, and discover many wonderful things about this excellent animation tool! :)

The Interface

That is your interface, you should know that. Just in case you do not know, here are the controls.

Play: View the framees!

Stop: Stop the whole thing.

Repeat: Makes your animation loop.

Scroll Bar: Adjust the speed.

Stickman: After loading a figure, its name will appear here. Click the downward arrow (drop-down bar) to view the list of figures currently loaded. “Stickman” is the default figure.

Add Figure: Add the figure you are playing about with now, so you have two.

Edit: Mess around with your sticman's joints.

Centre: Move your stickan to the middle of screen.

Flip: Turns it the other away, with the same everything.

Colour: Change colour.

100: This shows how big your stickan is. The higher, the bigger.

Front: Make it overlap other things.

Back: Opposite of above sentence.

Next Frane; Click this, then make your stickman move a little, making a smooth animation.

File: You can save and load stuff here.

Options: You can adjsut things here.

Help: You see legal stuff.

Exit: Obvious!


Each stickguy has load sof joints. You can see them, they are red. If you click them, you can move them. The orange dot, which is sometimes known as the origin, moves the whole thingy. If you dont highlight the stickman, it will look blue. If you move a joint, or the whole thing -- you will see grey sutff. This is where the stickman part used to be. Sometimes called draw-back-skin.

It's obvious to save and laod, so i will not go through that!



Creating Models

Click file, then create figure type.
It opens a window which looks like this: the Window I was Taking about

Here are the options:
“Add line”: Create a new line segment to attach to the model.
“Add circle”: Create a new circle segment to attach to your model.
“Toggle segment kind”: Change the segment from a line to a circle, or vice-versa.
“Change segment thickness”: This edits the thickness of separate segments. By setting thickness to 0, you can make “invisible lines”.
“Duplicate segment”: Makes a copy of the highlighted segment, which can then be attached to another segment.
“Static/Dynamic segment”: Dynamic segments can be moved around in animations. Static segments cannot be moved.
“Delete segment”: Removes the highlighted segment from the model.
“File”: Here you can start a new model, open a saved one, save the current model or add the current model to the animation.
“Options”: Here you can undo a mistake made with the model or switch to edit mode.
“Edit mode”: This mode is used to change the length of a line or circle on your model.


Lets Go On

Make sure you get used to Pivot. Make little cool fioghts between two guys, that is a lot of fun. Look at galleries, this is inspiring,


Vital Walking

Walking is really important, it makes your animations look good. So, here is a tutorial, step by step to teach you:
Frame 1: Your stickman is at a standstill, about to move off.
Frame 2: The right arm moves forward slightly, the left moves backward slightly, the origin moves forward slightly, the right leg moves back slightly while still on the ground, the left leg moves forward. The spine leans forward a tiny bit.
Frame 3: Same as frame 2, except the right forearm moves forward slightly more than the right bicep. The left arm stays straight however. The right leg stays on the ground in the exact same place, the left leg rises more, the left foot also rises slightly. The origin moves forward.
Frame 4: Same as frame 3, except the left forearm curves slightly toward the body of the stickman. The origin moves forward.
Frame 5: Same as frame 4, except the left foot touches the ground. The origin moves forward.
Frame 6: The left foot stays where it is, the right thigh comes forward, the right shin goes back, the right foot is still touching where it originally rested, the right forearm keeps curving forward, the right bicep moves back, the left arm moves forward. The origin moves forward.
Frame 7: Same as frame 6, except the right foot leaves where it originally rested and rises into the air. The origin moves forward.
Frame 8: Same as frame 7, except the right shin now moves forward instead of back. The origin moves forward. It is vital that the two legs and arms now cross over each other at angles, to simulate a realistic crossing over of limbs. This part of the walk cycle is probably the most important for realism.
Frame 9: The arms and legs move apart again, continuing their original paths. The origin moves forward.
Frame 10: The left arm moves forward, the right moves backward, the right leg moves back while still on the ground, the left leg moves forward. The origin moves forward.

I'm not bery good, but I found a picture which the ending results should look like: WALKING!!!


Now Running

Running

1: Running is naturally a fast motion. Speed is better than smoothness, but speed results in choppiness. Finding the balance between smoothness and speed is very difficult. In my opinion, 4 frames per stride is the best for speed, and 9 is the best for smoothness. 7 is the best for realism.

2: When running, the camera should be following the stickman. Usually you’d have the arms going back and forth in a moving camera run. You’ll get a normal looking run out of that. However, if you animate running with a stationary camera, you have to find something to do with the arms. To alleviate the choppiness, you can try a masking blur (See my third general tutorial). Also, you could occupy the stickman’s arms with a machine gun or a sword or something; otherwise you get an extremely choppy animation. I’ve seen at least 4 DD elites make this mistake, including me. :P

3: There is a “vital frame” theory for running, or so I call it. Even if you animate running as you imagine it in real life, in most cases it won’t look right in pivot. The most important vital frame is the one where the legs and arms cross over each other. One limb must be angled slightly, while the straight one crosses over it.

4: When running, both feet come off the ground longer than the feet on the ground. Don’t go nuts with this though, otherwise your stickman will look like he’s floating. One frame’s difference is enough.

5: Running adds motion and “cinematic speed” to your animation, which means animations with running in them are better than ones where the stickman is moving around the same space all the time.

6: Keep the stickman leaning forward while running. It makes him look like less of a loser. Yeah.

7: When the front foot slams down onto the ground, make the head bob down slightly on the next frame, and then resume its position the frame after. Also, the spine moves up and down slightly and rythmically while running. Don’t overdo either of these, they’re really just small details if you’re after some shiz running.

8: When the stickman is standing stationary, about to run, lean forward slowly and move the arms less intensely as you would when in full, fast running. Make him crouch slightly on the front knee, and then you can take off into the main running.

9: Download thie running animation I found, and study the frames.

RUN RUN


Combat Cool Techniques

Lets Punch

Punch from a standing start:

Frame 1: Your stickman is at a standstill, legs apart, spine curved, arms loose.
Frame 2: The right arm moves forward, the left bicep moves backward, the left forearm contracts slightly and moves into the bicep. The right leg slides forward on the ground slightly, and the left stays where it is. Both leg’s knees drop slightly, making the stickman crouch.
Frame 3: Same as frame 2, but each movement is more pronounced.
Frame 4: Same as frame 3, but each movement is more pronounced.
Frame 5: Same as frame 4, but every joint except the arms slow down.
Frame 6: Same as frame 5.
Frame 7: The right bicep moves back, but the forearm still moves forward. The left leg is brought forward. The origin rises over the right leg. The left arm is almost folded into one joint. It’s important that you don’t fold them perfectly; otherwise it looks like your stickman has lost half his arm.
Frame 8: The right arm comes back, with the forearm bisecting the torso. The left arm should now be hidden inside the right arm, to suggest that the arm is going straight through the stickman.
Frame 9: The left arm fully extends out, making the punch look explosive and fast. The right elbow is pointed backwards. Don’t ask me why, it just looks the most realistic to have it like that when the punching arm is fully extended.
Frame 10: The punching arm stays extended for one more frame, to emphasise the locked out arm. The rest of the limbs start to drop.

Here is a fantastic example:
Punchy!

Punchy Combos

Frame 1-9: Same as above.
Frame 10-13: You simply repeat frames 7-10, but the right arm drops faster to make way for the left arm to punch.
Frame 14-21: The two arms rotate in a circle, with one arm folding almost double. Have the arms form a vertical line as the left leg crosses over the right leg during the step. Also, the right foot should be rotating backwards to allow for the knee joint to bend. If you don’t animate the foot rotating, your stickman will look reverse jointed, or as if his knee was broken.
Frame 21-26: Move your stickman into a stylish stance

Cool example i foubd
Three Hit Punch



Kicks

Kicks add an athletic type of skill to your fighting animations; however, they’re fairly difficult to animate properly. There are way too many types of kicks for me to animate them all, so I’ll just deal with some of the basic ones, and maybe one technical kick. Here’s how to animate three basic kicks:

Straight Kick:

Frame 1: Your stickman is at a standstill, legs apart.
Frame 2-5: The origin moves forward and down slightly, the arms move apart, the right foot stays where it is, the right knee bends, the left leg comes forward and stays straight. The spine curves back.
Frame 6-10: Pretend the left leg is an arm. Now animate this “arm” as if it was punching. Behold, you just animated a kick. :P As the leg comes to the waist of the stickman, start moving the arms back towards each other, and curve the spine in the opposite direction. When the leg is fully extended, leave it like that for two frames to emphasise its impact.
Frame 11-15: Drop all the limbs and straighten the spine.

Wicked example i found, looks cool:
Kicks


Backgrounds

Background are important, here is soem I found.

Hospital


Forest


Cool Eeffect

Look at this picture:

This Picture

Wouldn't it be nice if the background moves along with the man, to amke it more realistic...like this:

Like This!

What you do is, move the cityscape model left by one pixel every frame, and do the same with the stickman. Your result will look liek the pcutre link above.

ZOOMING

Easing applies to zooming in. The best way to do this is on the first frame, increase the size by one, then 2, then 5, then 10, 15, 20, 25, 35, 50 and so on. Just reverse those figures for when you’re finishing with the zoom movement. Here’s a small example:

ZOOOOOM

With imagination, you'll end up with cool thigns like.......:

Imagination




Bolt Lightning:

The beauty of bolt lightning is that you can just place it for a massive boost to your animation graphically, and there’s no need to animate it degenerating and you can simply delete it when it’s finished. The three best colours of bolts you could use are red, yellow and blue:

To animate a bolt strike:

Frame 1: The area is empty. Select your target(s).
Frame 2: Place the first bolt on the target and apply a tremor effect. The bolt has destroyed the ground around where it hit, so clear the space around where the bolt hit and replace it with debris particles.
Frame 3: Flip the bolt and move it again so that it’s still on the target. Animate the particles flying away.
Frame 4-12: Delete the bolt and finish animating the particles.

You'll end up with:

Bolt...


FIRE-FLAMES

Draw about 15-20 different looking flame models, about the same size but with slightly different changes every time. Choose the object you're setting fire to first of all. On frame 1, have a small spiky flame erupt at the source of ignition.

On frame 2, have the flame burst upward, and animate a few particles of the object breaking off. Also, animate small embers from the fire rising into the air.

On frame 3, have the flame go upward slightly and move randomly. Animate about 5 particles per flame section.

On frame 4 and onward, have the background colours flicker slightly. This gives the illusion of the fire's flickering quality. Repeat frame 3 and have the particles going up slightly and shrinking all the time.

Fire I found


FINALLY.......


Saving in GIF

Click file, then save animation.
You will see...

What you will see

Do the normal sutff, then, the important part, you'll see this.

Important

These are the best settings.

The End! Hope it helped.

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