This was my week 2 homework for FutureLearn's Explore Animation course: Create an animation in which two stick figures enter the scene, interact in some simple way, then leave.
It's not the worse animation you'll ever see, but you can probably do better!
Run this sketch in your browser
For each pose a stick figure was positioned using the mouse pointer, then the print() function was called to generate each chunk of code you see pasted into Poses.pde.
You'll probably want to use the StickFigure class in your own way, but it might be worth taking a quick look at how I arrange poses into ordered key frames, so that when AnimatedFigure.draw() is called we can find the key frame immediately before and after the requested frame, then call tween() to generate a stick figure positioned exactly where it should be drawn in-between the two poses. This results in nice smooth animation.
The three boolean flags at the top of this file control which mode the sketch is run in.
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| bRunAnimation | Displays the finished animation |
| bWorkOnAnimation | This is where I worked on the animation. The stick figure can be posed by dragging points around. Left and right arrows to move through the current sequence of poses. N for a new pose. P to print. To help line up the next pose, the previous pose is shown as a half transparent 'onion skin'. |
| bRecord | Don't switch this on until you're prepared for this directory to fill up with .png files of each consecutive frame! Then use tools such as Processing's Movie Maker, ImageMagick or ffmpeg to convert the frames into a video file or animated .gif |