Walking tutorial
Sorry about the sound quality, words are below ^^.
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Okay this is pivot animator, and this is where you load your stickfigurse from, and your gonna load a base line, and your gonna take this base line and stick it at the bottom for the floor.
Now if you wanna take your stick man and you can place him left, right or in the centre, and in this case it's in the centre. Okay, so your start to move your stick man into a position so that it looks like he's walking, so you bend his limbs, make sure you bend every limb, so his arms are gonna wave his legs will move and his back may bend slightly aswell. Okay so you click next frame, and your gonna start to move as if he is walking.
Now the front leg is a pivot point, and the back leg, and the rest are gonna follow around it, so that you pivot over the front leg, see now the front leg is going behind, and the back leg is coming forwards, and as you see he has pivoted around the back leg which was at the front, now the front leg is gonna start to do the same in retrospect. And all the way through this your doing the same with the arms. See now the front leg is turning straight, and the back leg is starting to bend.
I'm just testing it to see how it looks so far, see if ther'es any glitches, see if ive moved him too far. See now the front leg has gone completely straight and its now the new pivot point. So you see you don't move him further than the leg in the shadow, you keep the front leg in the shadow of the last stick, so you see just at the bottom there the front leg which is now at the back, is at the same base point as the last shadow was.
Now your bending all of his limbs, making sure they are all moving in a smooth motion, and make sure you don't forget his arms. And if your confused as to which arm is going backwards or forwards, it doesn't really matter because they both look similar, but you can go back on the frames to check.
Now we are just doing the same sort of animation, where his front leg stays straight and his back leg hooks through and they switch. So now you are getting nearer to the end of the walking animation, and in this one of course he is actually moving across the screen, where and in a minute I will show you one where the camera stays fixed on him, but its not, its actually that the ground is moving underneath him and that he is walking.
See now the front leg is going straight again, your putting it on the same pivot point as the last shadow, bending his arms, moving his legs, that arm comes out that arm goes forwards, move the pivot leg, bring the tuck leg through, bend the bottom a bit, oops wrong leg, bend that one and straighten that one, that's right and now we are going on to the next frame, don't forget his arms.
There we go now we test it, and it seems okay. Now there is not a lot of movement you can see that, but it's a repetitive movement, and it looks more effective in an animation.
Okay so now we're doing the same again, we're getting the base line, and I keep on getting the wrong one here. See that's the little one and its called basic line, not base line, I do it twice I think and I start to get annoyed. Nope got the right one. Okay so you stick the base line down, and you stick the man on it.
Now with this it's slightly different, its not like your using the front leg as a pivot point, its like your using the head, and keeping the head in the centre of the frame. So your gonna bend all of the animated points, and your starting to do the same thing, only, your trying to keep the head in the centre of the animation for the whole thing, and youll see why when its finished. Bending the arms bending the legs, next frame.
So we are doing the same thing, now ive only moved him forwards a tiny bit, but it wont affect the actual animation. It's sort of to show that he is stepping up in the air, cuz as you do when your legs bend you go down, when they straighten out up you go back up. See and now you can see in the shadow that he has actually moved back a bit.
That's it, bending all the limbs, now what your doing is your making sure that this frame, is the same as the first frame that you made. And if it is, then it will look like that ^^.