-=Public message=- Let the gif fully load so its smooth before comenting please
I realy enjoyed Jams pivot animations and given that pivot was free i thought id download it and give it a go. Its much harder than i expected unfortunatly but nonetheless fun. I nead some real help with my animation though, I cant seam to get a realistic blood effect and keeping a constant walking pace i find realy dificult, any tips?

And heres the animation [ i hope it works for you]:



Its no wherenear as good as jams but its best i could do first try...

thoughts?

I haven't tried walking yet, And the blood have not done anything with it. IF you want to see what i did, look in the last 2 pages of the Pivot megga thread. But for your first one, its good.

Cheers
And gifs seam to take ages to load to the page so if your looking at this ani let it laod for abit everyone

If you save it as a .gif, when you are posting go to "additional options...". Then were it says Attach press the brows button and find were you saved the pivot as a .gif and then post. It takes to long to load doing it your way.... This way is faster to laod.

Very smooth, I like it.

Your first ever? It's so damn good. Very smooth, nice beginning thing.

As far as i can tell smoothness is just a matter of time on your hands that little bit took over an hour.
I tried using red lines for blood effect but it looks abit cack. And when i was doing the blood first i moved the blood with the head but that looks realy bizare so i just made a cloud of red spots come out of the impact point, it looks ok but i cant realy imagine how to do more complex blood effects.

I only ask real cause the continuation of that ani is ofc going to have some guns

I'm glad you liked my animations. That is fantastic for a first animation!!! My first animation was no where near that good. If you want help I've written a pivot tutorial. http://www.toribash.com/forum/index.php?topic=9276.0
I'm not that great at blood either, so I can't really teach you that. But the tutorial shows different movements, (running, walking and some different types of punches and kicks.) Pivot technique (tricks to make your animations look smoother and better in general.) and effects (to make your animations exciting! All I do for blood is get some red lines, they get smaller every frame, and every frame a small red ball comes off which travels slower than the lines and gets smaller at a lower rate. It's hard to explain and it looks alright, but not great. Do you want some more stick figures to use in your animations? I have heaps of them.

Yeah i found your tutorial realy helpful especially your advice for making gifs. Is there a way to add backgrounds or are you limited to making big coloured blobs etc?

Im going to play around more with pivot this evening, i want to make some chunkier looking characters and hopefully make them look more individual than the standard stickman.

When i was doing the punch i had to make several new stickmen with increasingly short arms to get it to look ok, is there anyway of getting round the necesity to repeatedly make new stick figures?

The other thing i tried to were explosions which i found very dificult.

Also do you know if theres a way of making colours more see through? i want to try a flash bang effect and some other stuff

You can import a jpeg or bitmap background by clicking file, load background in pivot. This one background has to be used in your whole animation and can't change. I draw backgrounds using stick-figures, so I can rotate and move them.

This is hard to explain so http://www.toribash.com/forum/index.php?topic=9276.0 Go here and download the .piv files. Look how the spin kick was done to make it appear 3d. He tucks part of his leg inside his body so you can't see it making it appear shorter. Also in fast-sequence it looks really good.

Explosions are extremely hard, unfortunately. I never use them because they end up looking crap.

Making colours more see-through, it's called translucency and it's not possible in pivot. I wanted to make a sick smoke effect but it's really hard without translucency. You can create the illusion though. For a flash-bang, make your sticks that are on-screen white one frame then slowly fade back to their original colours.