How to Draw Cool Stick Figures Fighting

Who thought stick figure animation was dead? With all the capability and software out there, approximate what, stick figure animation is really cool. Especially with 10 yr quondam boys! It's really popular with boys, and it'south all about stick men fighting. It's really quick for them to make, which is a huge plus, and it'south all about action, some other plus. My son picked information technology upwards direct away, no preparation needed. He loves it and its a smashing outlet for life's frustrations. So what is the best stick figure animation software, and is there a great complimentary stick figure animator out there for you to try today? Absolutely.

At the moment nosotros are using Pivot and we've also tried Stickman & Elemento. Pivot is the best to get started really rapidly with no learning curve at all, my son was animating as soon equally we opened the programme. Stickman & Elemento all the same, needs a bit of learning first, it was frustrating at the start, merely it has lots of promise and lots of potential.

Call up free software is often fabricated past a programming enthusiast and they are not always able to make information technology user friendly every bit thats a completely different skill.

If yous really get into it, here is a niggling blog on the history of stick figure animation from Know Your Meme.

By the way, none of these are affiliate links, I don't do good from telling you near them, I'chiliad but offering you the fruits of my own enquiry. Just in case you wanted to know!

Cutout Pro, Stickman & Elemento

The promotional site Cutout Pro

The information Wiki site

Bone:  Windows

I'm putting this 1 first because at that place is merely so much potential in this software packet. Stickman is the blitheness software and Elemento is the effigy editor. Together they make up Cutout Pro, because y'all can basically make cutting out animation on your windows PC. The two come up together, so when you open up Stickman, each time you choose 'create figure' Elemento will open for you to brand your graphic symbol. You can so save these figures and import them into Stickman, there is also an online library of stick figures that you tin import and employ in your project, these are chosen upwards from within the software. This is a great piece of software, as it is good for more than just animative stick figures. So information technology's piece of cake to use, and y'all tin can starting time of making stick men fight each other all twenty-four hour period, merely y'all can so progress to more than creative and involved characters, adding audio, editing and and then on. It too has bones expressions, so information technology'due south slap-up introduction to programming too.

This is an astonishing film made with Stickman, and so y'all tin can see the potential hither:

Although the current version 5.half-dozen does price, its only $x USD. All the same there is a free version, the Alpha version of 5.7. It seems to have been developed from near 2002 past Sven Nilsen, the last update was in 2013 where it has reached V5.7.026.

This isn't promoted much and seems to be aimed at primary schools, and I believe it is installed in many. In the United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland Blitheness is now on the curriculum in year 5, so this may be ane of the things they do then.

Key features from the website:

• Import PNG, JPEG, GIF, PSD (Photoshop)
• Animate in Photoshop or GIMP
• Create line drawings on infinite sheet
• Animate with key frames, control points, switches, matrix
• 3D-like interpolation of size
• Path tool
• Pick upwards and drop items
• Command trunk poses, switches with keyboard
• Generate walk
• Create your own figures
• Unlimited undo and redo
• GDI+, AntiGrain rendering with OpenGL acceleration
• Deform and effect nodes
• Slide physics for "line rider" similar simulation
• Pin Stickfigure 2.2.5 integration
• Speech bubbles
• Unlimited cameras and blitheness length
• Expressions
• Many features for reusing graphics between projects
• Sound with animated triggering, book and pan
• Tape sound util
• Consign to nine popular video formats
• Export to Flash
• Snapshot a frame, export frames as PNG sequence
• Finish motion, capture video of desktop or webcam util
• Put video clips together

There is a YouTube Aqueduct for the preparation here. The principal YouTube channel is hither, and has a range of interesting videos.

PROs

Information technology does a lot, has lots of potential. Its costless, or very cheap. Lovely color picker system!

CONs

You lot volition benefit from watching the tutorials and spending just a little time figuring out what to do.

Download STICKMAN & ELEMENTO here.

Pivot Animator

Pivot website

OS:  Windows

Free for personal and commercial utilize. The business model creates revenue from adware in the software installer, which you can remove or opt out of, and revenue from YouTube ads, but this is what keeps the software complimentary to use for anybody. It really is easy and fun to employ, here is a 'how to' video nosotros fabricated.

This is perchance the most well known and popular stick effigy animation software of its time. The software was made by Peter Bone for his brother who needed something very user friendly and elementary to use, that was back in 2004, at present it is widely used and available in several unlike languages, the latest release was V4 in 2016. The idea behind it was to make stick figures that could be animated easily just by dragging their limbs and joints into different positions, and the proportions would stay the same because each limb is jointed with a pivot. Just like a cardboard cutting-out figure joined with paper fasteners.

Here are the Key features:

• Easy to make animation
• Create simple figures
• Load your own backgrounds including bitmap images
• Position your figures with easy to use handles
• Frame by frame animation and keyframes
• Create cycled flick clips and give them motion in the scene
• Export animated gifs, sequence of images or avi videos for YouTube
• Help and user forums
• Tutorials are provided by Pivot users and fans on YouTube and at that place is full user help on the website
• Official YouTube channel for Pivot by Peter Bone

Here is a video showing the New Features of Pin 4.two

Every bit well equally how to's on YouTube in that location are too useful series of Watch Me Animate by Pivot fans, which give you a nifty insight into what is involved in creating animations with this software, heres one of a great series:

PROs

Very uncomplicated to use, focused on doing ane thing very well and very simply. You can start without any kind of tutorial. It comes with some predesigned characters and you can download more characters from Droidz that other people have made and animate them, but it's as well super easy to brand your own figures.

CONs

The software does non support audio, so you lot have to import your animation to some other package to do that. This is not really a bad thing anyhow, because this keeps the software unproblematic and like shooting fish in a barrel to apply. Each stick figure can only be one colour, simply the benefit of this is that you don't have to worry which parts of the figure are in forepart or backside, then it makes animative simpler. Character editing and creation is done in a separate window then it's difficult to see how it fits in your scene, but now in Version 4 this window has a transparency setting and so this is not really a problem anymore. Oh, and it's not available for Mac.

Download Pivot here and give information technology a effort!

Dimp Animator

A mac version of Pivot was fabricated and was released for preview at the end of 2008 by Sijmen Mulder. Merely as far every bit I can see it was never released. But then Stykz came out and filled that gap in the market. Here is Dimp'southward old blogspot.

Here is a piddling video of it being used on YouTube.

Stykz

Stykz website

OS: Mac, Windows, Linux

Originally designed as a subset of pivot it'south the first multi-platform stick figure animation plan, and its free for all uses. It was started in 2008, by Ken Ray in response to his children using Pivot and being frustrated at its shortcomings. So far it'southward at version one.0.2 stage. At the moment you can donate to them, but the business model may exist to sell upgraded versions of the software, simply always have a freemium version to start with.

There are many similarities between Pivot and Stykz: they both support frame based animation, both apply key frames, apply the Enter primal to create new frames whilst dragging an object, undo, create and edit figures, static and hidden segments, scale and rotate figures, drag nodes, the list does actually become on a fair flake. But the key differences are that Stykz lets y'all do more to segments of a graphic symbol, it can be used on a mac and exports .mov. A total comparison is hither, although it's with Pivot V3 not V4, you get the movie. But these differences can make Stykz a little more catchy to use, as it gives yous more options to learn about.

Here is a list of features:

• Frame based blitheness
• Both static and pivoting nodes
• Stretch and distort a segment during a scene
• Add and remove nodes from a segment during a scene
• Create and edit characters straight on the stage
• Comes with predefined figures that can be used as a starting betoken
• Create filled regions with the PollyFill tool
• Export animated gif, image sequence, transparent PNGs sequence, .mov for YouTube
• Full help documentation and Tutorials on the website, forums and community support
• There is as well a Windows tool to allow you lot to convert your Pivot files to exist used in Stykz

What's really interesting to annotation is what Stykz has on the list for hereafter versions. Here is a sample of what they are working towards: Audio furnishings and background sound; Transitions and visual effects; Sprites (imported images); Inbetweening; Draw objects (polygons, ovals, arrows, etc.), Text boxes and word balloons; Drag-reordering of frames; Grouping of frames into "clips"; Automated uploading/downloading of .styk files to/from the Forum (or other sharing area for Stykz files). So you can see information technology has big plans and is planning to become somewhere, all the same the final update was in 2011.

PROs

Multiplatform software, meliorate than the before versions of Pivot, easy to employ, easy to breathing.

CONs

No sound notwithstanding, only planning to add it at a later date. No background images, doesn't support bitmap, simply you could create simple backgrounds with shapes.

Download STYKZ here.

TISFAT (This is Stick Effigy Animation Theater)

OS:  Windows

TISFAT is like Pin, but speeds upwards the procedure because you can place keyframes along the timeline and the tweens will be created for yous. It seems to have more than features and the timeline looks similar Wink. It looks and sounds great.

However this software does not have its ain website, and as far as I can see is no longer supported, I really tin can't find much about it online, but abased websites from around 2012. I can't find when it was fabricated or who by. And so I can merely assume that information technology is no longer around, although you can still find downloads for information technology.

The near recent review on YouTube doesn't go us that much closer to a reliable download.

Key features are here:

• Drawing primitives (lines, rectangles, bitmaps, polygons, text)
• Elementary ready-to-use stick figures
• The ability to create any custom stick figure, with equally many limbs as you choose
• Attaching bitmaps to limbs
• Drawing stick figures as curves
• Create-A-Scene, enabling creating animation through physics
• Edit and run-time onion skinning
• Tracing of a video background
• Setting blastoff values of every element
• Rotation of most elements
• Export to popular formats (Animated GIF, AVI, Flash)

Here is a YouTube video tutorial showing you the utilise of TISFAT

Y'all can see from the screenshots of TISFAT here how similar the timeline is to Flash.

Stick Nodes

Phone App

Stick Nodes website

Download from Google Play

Download from Apple App Store

Stick Nodes is a simple and robust stickfigure blitheness plan for android and apple tree mobile devices. You can create animated GIFs and MP4s by animating stickfigures right on your tablet or telephone. In that location is a free version of the app which has ads and a watermark, simply the Pro version is only $2.99. The developer, Ralph Damiano, started off equally a swell Pin user and built Stick Nodes in 2014.

The cardinal features include:

• Automatic frame-tweening, to make your animations smoother
• Add audio furnishings to the frames of your animations, (PRO version only)
• A virtual camera to movement and zoom, make your animations cinematic
• Filters such every bit mistiness, saturation, inversion, glow and tint (PRO version merely)
• Variety of shapes, colour/calibration on a per-segment footing
• Gradient colors, too to make your stickfigures look realistic or cartoony
• Textfields brand it easy to add text and dialog to your animations
• Power to create, salvage, import, and share stickfigures you create
• Thousands of awesome stickfigures available on the website for free
• Compatibility with Pivot-created STK files (version 2.ii.7 and earlier)
• Clean, mobile-inspired interface – compression-to-zoom for ease and convenience
• Forward and backward onion-skinning for precise animating
• An disengage/redo system, don't worry virtually fat-finger mistakes
• Export to GIF (free version) or MP4 (PRO version but) for your Youtube channel!
• Stick Nodes community

PROs

Very immediate to employ and fun. Best used on a tablet.

CONs

Annoying to apply on a phone. My son'south assessment "not bad for me, annoying for my fingers, I'd prefer to do this on a laptop".

Describe A Stickman

Draw A Stickman website

Well this is non animation software past whatever stretch, but because this weblog is for kids, I thought that if the older kids are making stuff on Pivot or Stickman, then the actually niggling ones can get to see their ain stickman come to life with this, then they feel included too, and at not actress effort to you.

Draw a Stickman – Notice the web game here. You tin literally depict a stickman and run into them get part of a story. Bang-up for younger kids, where they will get to run into their niggling stickman drawing start to movement on its own without any effort on their part. The magic begins!

Epic 2 – At present available on the Nintendo Switch and Wii – depict a stickman and guide it through an epic stickman adventure. Find it hither.

I think from this list you tin can find the all-time stick effigy animation software for you. In that location is a smashing gratuitous stick figure animator out there for everyone, even if you are non supposed to exist a kid anymore!

Please postal service a link to your stick figure animations on YouTube in the comments below!

And if you lot hear of any other costless stick figure animation software, tell united states of america about it in the comments.

Thank you for reading, and I promise you give one a try.

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Source: https://justmakeanimation.com/best-stick-figure-animation-software-free-stick-figure-animator/

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