how to animate stick arms - fireworks

I know this is a very basic question but I have kinda been thrown in at the deep end with this assignment for web development, I have managed to create 2 pretty good images on firewowkrs, but I have no idea how to animate them.I have had a little play around with the controls like the states and stuff and I still do not understand, i've tried the combined path and that doesnt seem to work for me. I would like to simply animate both of their arms to show that they are waving up and down. It consists of the stick arms and then the arms have four stick fingers as well, if this is of any help ?

This tutorial might help you grasp the basics of animation in firworks, it did for me
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/fireworks/articles/animated_logos.html
or you can have a read through some basics at the adobe website:
Fireworks CS4 Basics
or
Fireworks CS5 Basics
Hope this helps

Related

How to make a 2D model(moveable) like gomoji app?

I want to make a 2D model in iOS programatically. Like this:
This is taken from the app Gomoji.
I googled it but not get the proper solution.
This character is also moving so it can move hands and the legs meanwhile I want to change the colour of the hands etc.
Could it be possible with SpriteKit, SceneKit, gif, SVG or anything else?
This is an incredible amount of work in code, with SpriteKit and actions.
You might be better off using the puppet features of After Effects to creation motion frame sequences, and then bring them into SpriteKit and string them together and jump between the sequences as necessary.
Start here, to understand the puppetry tools in AE:
https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/animating-puppet-tools.html
Once you've learnt the lingo, head on over to youtube to pick up tips on how to do 2D arms, head wobbles, etc.
There's also a face animator in the latest versions of After Effects, that might be helpful, too.
Generally speaking, this is still a lot of work. And a lot of fiddling to get it to look "just so". But doing this visually, with manual mouse controls and instant playback before exporting image sequences from AE will be lightyears faster than attempting to do this with joints and code in SpriteKit or any other game engine.

Cocos2D + Box2D Editor?

I want to develop an Angry Birds style game (more for learning purpose), so I am digging into Cocos2D + Box2D and after having done a few test all by code I am wondering which tool can I use to design level easier ?
A bit of google pointed me out Tiled or R.U.B.E. but I am not really sure if it's what I need. Tiled seem to be more designed for tiled game like a plat-former and I don't really know about R.U.B.E.
What I'd like to do is being able to place my body manually in a scene, set their physic property and so...
Which tool would you recommend for this kind of level design ?
Thank in advance.
I advise you to download/buy LevelHelper/SpriteHelper, they have helped me a lot when I was a novice with box2d. I think it's just what you need, once you learn the basics then you can go forward freely without them. In addition now there's also one or more tutorials on the Ray Wenderlich site that will help you even more like this (The softwares are not free, but in my opinion they worth their price)

How to animate for a 2D ios game?

I'm planning on making a simple 2D game (I'm leaning towards an endless runner) for the iPhone and am using cocos2d and I can make stand alone images in Photoshop or Illustrator but I'm not sure what the best way to animate them is??
I don't know if I should animate a character running in flash then save each frame as a png and then use something like texture packer to make a sprite sheet or loop the png's together in cocos2d?? I don't know what works well with cocos2d and how to optimize the animation to run smoothly and reduce memory. I'm aware it maybe a broad question but any help or guidance would be appreciated.
You should use sprite sheet and animate the frames using cocos2d.
Here are the tutorials by Ray Wenderlich
Here is the official coco2d video tutorial and sample
Plenty of tutorials out there. Your question is probably going to be flagged and closed in the near future. Try googling your questions first next time.

three.js - create draggable circle

I've just cloned the three.js project from github. I'm interested in creating a circle on a 2d plane that I can drag with my mouse. I have no experience in graphics programming (WebGL or OpenGL).
Can someone please point me in the right direction? I've tried google, but the examples seem too complicated.
Many thanks in advance,
I think this is something you need to have a go at. It's not nearly as complicated as you might think. If the maths are scaring you off, don't worry three.js handles it all for you, you just need to add a camera, some shapes and ask it to render them.
Please do take the time to go through aerotwists three js tutorials as these will give you a good grounding in how to setup a basic scene.
You will quickly realise that once you have a scene you can change objects quite easily using your current scene.
As for dragging things around, I'm sure that will come just try to walk before you can run.

Procedurally animating the growing of a 2D plant

I'm trying to figure out the best way to procedurally animate the growing of a 2D plant in iOS.
I want the plant to animate to give an encroaching feeling to the user.
Basically, to animate the growing of a branch, with little buds that will eventually animate into full grown leaves.
To breathe a little life into it, I'd also like the plant to sway a bit as it grows, rather than feeling hand painted on the screen.
One way I've thought of is to use CGPaths and Bezier curves to create the shape of the stalk and the leaves, but I'm not entirely sure how to animate the drawing of the paths. Once I get the "drawing" of the stalk, i'd like to "plant" little buds at certain points on the stalk, as the line is growing/animating and these buds will also start to grow outwards from the plant.
Any suggestions on what route to take to accomplish this task? I'd prefer to procedurally animate as opposed to hand drawing each frame and animating that way. My reasoning is that I imagine procedurally animating will be less time consuming, give me more control over different aspects of the animation, and be reusable in other projects (not to mention, it will be fun to program!)
I've come across this blog posting for the drawing of animated lines:
http://oleb.net/blog/2010/12/animating-drawing-of-cgpath-with-cashapelayer/
Perhaps this would be a starting approach for achieving the results I want, I need to sit down and go through the code he posted.
Also, maybe this is something that would be easier to do using cocos2d or something similar? Or perhaps quartzcore and core animation will work fine.
Thanks for any suggestions you might have, any information is helpful at this point.
(Great question! Posting this as a "community wiki" since it is not an answer but just some references and I didn't want the links to get screwed up in comments. Perhaps people want to add to this?)
I did a simple search on "procedural tree branching code" and there were lots of interesting hits - really rich area.
A post on gameDev.stackExhange pointed to this great resource: Algorithmic Botany
Also Snappy Tree is pretty amazing and the source code is available.
These two also sound interesting:
TReal is a program capable of generating realistic 3D tree models.
Arbaro is an implementation of the tree generating algorithm described in Jason Weber & Joseph Penn: "Creation and Rendering of Realistic Trees" written in Java.
Perhaps more accessible to the OP and with a less complex result are these actionScript tutorials on fractal trees. ActionScript drawing code is pretty easily translated to Core Graphics.

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