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
Re: Animating Stick Figures (Puppet tool?) by Travis Roop on Jul 21, 2008 at 9:47:35 pm
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 luck
Travis Roop
Editor
bitMAX Hollywood
troop@bitmax.net
Re: Animating Stick Figures (Puppet tool?) by Patrick Hearn on Jul 22, 2008 at 9:14:11 am
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.
Re: Animating Stick Figures (Puppet tool?) by Kevin Dearing on Jul 22, 2008 at 1:21:30 pm
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..
