Stick Nodes - Mobile animation app! (BETA is released)

[kellawgs]

Thank you Peter. I'm glad you are confident in it, I know it will grow on everyone else that feels against it.

I really appreciate that you're still working hard to improve our animating experience even after all the bad things that have happened with the site.

[Caleb]

I really don't see why tweening would be a problem. It would just get rid of all the tedious looking between frames because you know something's shaky but you can't quite figure out what. You're all acting like tweening would mean you just put a stickfigure, click a button and have elite material animation within a couple seconds while all it will do is relieve a bit of frustration.


tl;dr stop being conservative fucks you niggers

[kellawgs]

I really don't see why tweening would be a problem. It would just get rid of all the tedious looking between frames because you know something's shaky but you can't quite figure out what. You're all acting like tweening would mean you just put a stickfigure, click a button and have elite material animation within a couple seconds while all it will do is relieve a bit of frustration.


tl;dr stop being conservative fucks you niggers

^My point exactly. I don't see how we can't just all agree that tweening is a great, optional tool to include.

[Mitch]

Just gonna jump in and say that i'm not going to do coke and murder my family over pivot sorry if it was hard to pick up on that .
We should probs go back to talking about Ralph's app.

[Elliott]

Tweening still requires skill, but the process is made less repetitive, it's much more intuitive to adjust an easing curve that redraw 5 keyframes.

Back to StickNodes, I think it looks great! Nice possibility for some expansions with figure packs perhaps?

[peterbone]

Tweening still requires skill, but the process is made less repetitive, it's much more intuitive to adjust an easing curve that redraw 5 keyframes.

Back to StickNodes, I think it looks great! Nice possibility for some expansions with figure packs perhaps?

I don't plan to include easing curves for tweening in Pivot because it doesn't fit in with the simple way I intend implementing it. Tweening will be linear and so nonlinear movements will require more keyframes.

I guess StickNodes has it's own stick figure file format separate to STK. Although the Pivot v2 STK format was reverse engineered and is posted on animator.net somewhere.

[Krustalien]

People are silly, I think computerised in-betweens in Pivot would be great.

[Ralph]

Oh boy, what did I do here...

@peterbone
Thanks for the kind words, it means a lot coming from you. Yeah, while I'm not going to limit the devices that the app will run on, it will obviously be a lot better to use a tablet. I currently have a Nexus 10 (tablet) that I test with, and boy, the app looks and feels great compared to on a smaller device. I'm hoping the added ability to pinch-to-zoom and pan around the canvas area will ease some of the difficulties, though.

Also, like you said, Stick Nodes just exports to .gif right now. I don't plan on adding .avi support (and no sound, as a result) just to keep everything as simple as possible (better for a mobile app). This is also part of the reason I'm not allowing the number of tweened frames to be customizable (it's set at two).

@LordPivot
Thanks, and yes, you're good with that device.

@Elliott and @peterbone
Well, you have the ability to create figures and save them, just like Pivot. And to Peter, yeah, I have my own stickfigure format going. Actually, after it being suggested to me by a friend, I'd be very interested in having Stick Nodes be compatible with importing .stk's, but I'll contact you personally about that sometime soon :)

- - - - -

Damn, quite the heated debate about tweening here. I understand both sides of the argument. On one side, some people enjoy the satisfaction of seeing your hours of tedious animating come to fruition when you finally hit the play button and see that silky smooth animation. Tweening seems like cheating to them. On the other side, some people see how tweening will benefit them by simplifying the tedious parts of animation (walking, for example).

Think of tweening as just upping the baseline of quality when it comes to your typical Pivot animation. Beginners will not suddenly be on the same level as veterans/experts as they will also produce better content as well.

Also bear in mind, tweening will never work in 100% of cases and it still requires skill to use it to its fullest potential.

[Ralph]

And just like that, two weeks have went by. Wow, that was fast. Just wanted to post an update to give everyone following this project a heads up on what's-what.

You can check it out here: http://fortheloss.org/stick-nodes-update-6/

The tl;dr version: Things are wrapping up, there's not much left to do outside of testing and adding the final feature (the ability to import Pivot-made .stks). A July release date is looking promising.

[Lord]

Nice, just one more question. We all know that pivot animations (collectively) can take up a lot of space on a computer, will this be the same for Stick Nodes? Or are the files smaller than on pivot?

[Ralph]

@LordPivot
Since I'm targeting mobile devices, making sure the file sizes were small and optimized were very high priority. As a result, file sizes are very similar to what Pivot produces. On average, a typical Stickfigure file is about 2kb and a typical project file of 150 frames is 8kb.

- - -

Some more news, spent the day adding in the functionality to import Pivot .stk files (made with version 2.2.7 and down). Shout out to Peter for allowing me to use .stks in Stick Nodes.



Still need to do some tweaking. I'm seeing what I can do since Stick Nodes does not currently support the outlined-circle shape that Pivot uses for circles.

[peterbone]

@LordPivot
Since I'm targeting mobile devices, making sure the file sizes were small and optimized were very high priority. As a result, file sizes are very similar to what Pivot produces. On average, a typical Stickfigure file is about 2kb and a typical project file of 150 frames is 8kb.

- - -

Some more news, spent the day adding in the functionality to import Pivot .stk files (made with version 2.2.7 and down). Shout out to Peter for allowing me to use .stks in Stick Nodes.



Still need to do some tweaking. I'm seeing what I can do since Stick Nodes does not currently support the outlined-circle shape that Pivot uses for circles.

Just draw a circle with radius of STK file radius + 0.5 segment thickness. Then draw a white circle of radius STK file radius - 0.5 segment thickness at the same centre. I guess you will need to create a new circle type drawn this way for figures loaded from STK files.

[Ralph]

@peterbone
Yeah, thanks Peter, it was pretty easy to implement, pretty much did exactly what you said. I'd like to allow for the fill color to be changed but I think in the end I'll just keep it how it is, simple and easy to use.

- - -

I also did some tweaking with how the thickness is read/used when building regular limbs so now .stks look a lot more like how they do in Pivot.



I don't know why I felt the need to animate this scene but I did. (Good thing too because it made me realize I didn't implement copy/paste frame buttons, so I just now added them.)

At this point the app is pretty much done. All that's left is some testing from tomorrow onward.

Beta

I'm thinking of having an open beta where anyone who wants can download the beta version and give it a try while reporting back any bugs they find.

I'm also thinking I might have any stickfigures people create/save and send my way during the beta will be included in the /stickfigures/ folder by default when installing the app, that way your creation will ship with the app when it releases. (I'll also accept customized Pivot .stks - import them, maybe color in some of the segments/tweak it, save it as .stknodes file.)

Seems like an easy way for me to get out of the work of creating them myself ;)

More on that in a bit though, just want a day or so to rigorously test things myself.

[Ralph]

The BETA is out, guys!

Also, check out the official Facebook and Google+ pages!



I appreciate anyone who wants to give it a try and report back any bugs, suggestions, or anything.

How to join
To join the BETA, you first need to become a member of the Google+ community (https://plus.google.com/communities/114 ... 3577642177) and then navigate to this URL (https://play.google.com/apps/testing/or ... sticknodes) to download the BETA to your Android device.

Submit your created/modified stickfigures!
Submit any stickfigures you create (or modify/enhance your Pivot-created .stks by importing them) to my email and I'll include them in the stickfigure library of the official release later this month: [email protected]



Much excite.

[Lord]

Nice! I'll try post something later on.

Edit: I've made an animation, and I'm pretty happy with it, but... when I try to view it all I see is a black screen.
Here's my Google+ link for it.
https://plus.google.com/u/0/?tab=wX#104486811947907740768/posts/6yFjAbzehjJ?pid=6038186485038560642&oid=104486811947907740768