Each stickman is made of 2 parts, circles and rectangles. Here you can see how they slot together. Each circle acts like a sphere that appears the same from all angles. These are the joints, head, fingers and toes. Each rectangle acts like a cylinder. Rotated on its axis it doesn't change in appearance but like viewing a piece of paper from the side it shrinks in length as the limbs point into the foreground or background. The placing of the circles determines the length of the rectangles but the width is constant as the limbs don't change width and there's no perspective. You see each rectangle starts and ends directly in the center of a circle. Only from this pose can you see the full length of the rectangles. I use geometry to calculate where the circles should be. For example Pythagoras theorem to figure out how long the limbs should be depending on their angle to the viewer. If you treat it like a right triangle with one of the perpendicular axis going into the screen like looking down the end of a pencil, the diagonal edge being the length of the limb and the other perpendicular being the distance between the the center point of the circles you see on the screen you can calculate how long they should appear. I use other calculations for joints like the knees and elbows because they can only bend one way. However because I've made a lot of animations I have a lot of pre-made poses I can edit into what I like. There's only so many leg positions you can make for example so I can just find the legs I like and then adjust the arms, trunk and head to get the pose I want. I'm gonna post a few poses here to show you what I mean. Unlike Tsuchioh my stickmen don't have any width to the chest and pelvis and the shoulders and hips are attached directly to the spine of the character. This does look a little odd when the legs and arms are at rest but i think it's much easier to animate like this. Stickmen don't have fingers or faces so you have to think about what you want to do before you try to do it because you'll find all of the interactions and expression is body language only. I like to use Tai's move set for my characters a lot because it was made when practicing animation with stickmen so all the poses are very basic. A lot of animation is thinking of something you want to do and breaking it down into its individual elements and figuring out how to do each one before putting it all together. This is true even about poses. You have to think where each limb is going to be and in what position and then make that happen. You don't just work on it frame by frame and hope it to work. I want to use my knowledge to make animations so I'm working on turning the vectors into cartoon characters so i have faces and hands to work with. I can use what I know about animating to make some sweet martial arts animations like something from the matrix. And yeas I can do perspective now too. Ultimately I want to make a pseudo 3D game with the perspective of a first person camera but viewed from behind the character. The more I learn the closer I get. It's really not a pipe dream anymore.
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7 years, 2 months ago
30 Nov 2017 17:49 CET
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