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Animating Stick Figures
I am trying to animate some stick figures doing the YMCA dance. It’s a funny tv commercial for my company – don’t judge me! 😉
ANYway, I was looking for the easiest way to accomplish this. I have AE7 standard as well as Motion2. What is the better option for animating this? How would I go about it? Any help would be GREATLY appreciated!
Jesse Hassler
Complete Video
402.339.0001
je***@****ic.com -
3 Replies
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I would make the “sticks” out of solids, move their anchor points to the joint positions and add parent-child links to keep things together.
I haven’t actually ried this and there may be a problem I didn’t think about, but this is how I would first approach it if I didn’t have access to a 3d program. -
Yep, in AE with moving the anchor point and parenting, then posing the figure at key points then let AE interpolate, you can even use expressions to add movement to music, like bobbing the head (just link rotation to Audio Keyframes). You can make the Sticks with solids or from layered files you created in Photoshop or AI files from Illustrators.
Dan’s tut is great, just set yours up from a front view, the principles are the same.Dan Ebberts demonstrates
Animating a Walk-Cyclehttps://www.creativecow.net/show.php?page=/articles/ebberts_dan/layer_looping/index.html
Also, as an option, but not really necessary for your job,
Dan has Inverse Kinematics for figures here:https://www.motionscript.com/expressions-lab-ae65/ik.html
But you need to follow the directions precisely (setting it up perfectly Horizontal or Vertical is critical).
If you use IK then you just need to move the hands or the feet (or the farthest part) and the other limbs follow naturally.
And this earlier post about a nifty tooning app with easy Inverse Kinematics:Barend Onneweer
Date: Jul 26, 2006 at 6:40:30 am
Subject: Re: Advanced Parent/Child Properties QuestionOn another note:
For 2D cut-out character animation have a look at Moho:
https://www.lostmarble.com/It’s 90 bucks, but features everything I hope AE will one day do in terms of bone skeletons with
inverse kinematics, and bend deforms based on the bone skeleton…Bar3nd
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Other options are doing it in Flash or hand drawing it the ol fashined way and using a simple shareware program to grab frames and show you the onion skin from your previous frames.
Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com
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