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Animating Stick Figures (Puppet tool?)
Hello, I have a client who, in the next few weeks/days will be requesting that we produce a commercial spot using road-sign stick figures to walk across the screen. Obviously, there’s a million ways to do this, but what is the quickest and most effective way of doing this? Should I cut out each limb in photoshop, and just parent them together, or is the puppet tool the way to go? I gave a quick test with the puppet tool a few weeks ago, and it seems to kinda bend and distort things in a fairly unnatural way, especially if you’re wanting straight lines. And making a character walk with the puppet tool seems to not go so well, but if anyone has any suggestions, that would be helpful.
Television Producer
KTVF-11 Fairbanks, Alaska
video.ericbarker.com -
4 Replies
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I think you could combine the techniques,
cutting out the limbs in PS and moving the anchor points allows you to rotate the legs/arms from where the joints would be, but using the Puppet tool should work well if your character needs to jump around or move quickly.Sounds like you’re on the right track
Good luckTravis Roop
Editor
bitMAX Hollywood
troop@bitmax.net -
One technique I found works quite well is to simpy draw the stick man with the pen tool and then apply stroke on the layer. You have to then manually keep an eye on the lengths on limbs etc, but for certain jobs it’s a really quick way of working.
To get walking I’d suggest getting a walk cycle like these:
https://images.google.co.uk/images?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&hs=p2D&resnum=0&q=walk%20cycle&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wi
just put it on a layer behind and animate to that.Alternatively, video someone doing the actions and use that.
The advantage with using stroke is that all your lines will always be the same width.
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Hi Eric,
Dan Ebberts has an article on rigging cutout character rigged with inverse kinematics expressions.. Not sure if your stick figures will ever face the camera or just stay sideways, but I’m guessing that this way will save a LOT of work and will probably result in fairly decent / realistic movements..https://www.motionscript.com/design-guide/ik.html
–KTFA
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Another tutorial by Dan that would likely help is
Animating a Walk-Cycle Using Loop Expressions
–KTFA
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