New to Alice, want to make stickfigures!

[Sticketeer]

Hey, I just want to make a simple stickfigure to use in Alice, but I dont know of any free programs that can do this... I am not experienced in coding at all, just to let you know.

Please help if you can!

[gabe]

The easiest way to do this would probably be with SmoothTeddy (http://www-ui.is.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~takeo/java/smoothteddy/index.html). It's a very cool app that doesn't require any knowledge of 3D modeling. Make sure to export as an Alice SceneGraph (.asg) from within SmoothTeddy and then import it into Alice.

[DrJim]

The best program by far for stick figures is Pivot, http://www.geocities.com/peter_bone_uk/pivot.html . It's free and has very active forums at all levels. Unfortunately, since it is a 2D program, importing from Pivot into Alice is a bit difficult - you have to import the images as a series of textures for a billboard. See the forum thread. http://www.alice.org/community/showthread.php?t=553&highlight=pivot for more details and some examples.

A more severe disadvantage of Pivot is that you can't animate or otherwise edit the resulting figures in Alice - you would have to do all your edits in Pivot and then import the edited results.

If your goal is to make simple figures that you can then manipulate in Alice, Gabe's suggestion is probably the best. Smooth Teddy's ability to create objects that can be directly read by Alice is a major advantage of the program. There is also a companion program, Squirrel, which will let you experiment with animating your objects. One caution with Smooth Teddy - save your work often. It is (as the notes for the program itself say) very prone to crashing. :(

For you and others that might be interested, two other 2D programs I recommend are EasyToons http://www.superfundungeonrun.com/easytoon/ (see also http://conceptart.org/forums/showthread.php?t=52221) and Tales Animator http://www.dollysoft.com/index.htm . For what you want to do, these are less appropriate choices, but both are very useful programs. (They also have the same problems as Pivot for importing into Alice.)

If you do get some interesting results, I hope you will post them in the forum. :)

[gabe]

I will have to give Pivot a try sometime. My artistic ability is capable of doing stick figures, so this should be right up my alley.

[Sticketeer]

I used to use Pivot, and was pretty good with it, untill I switched to mac :)

I would use Smooth Teddy, but doesn't work on mac...

[Shadow Sovereign]

I still have pivot, too. :D

[DrJim]

Hadn't noticed that Smooth Teddy requires Windows OS - sort of a surprise since I thought the great thing about Java was that it was platform independent.

According to the notes on Takeo Igarashi's website, the earlier version, Teddy, has been run on a Mac - see http://www-ui.is.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~takeo/teddy/mac.html . There is a version that comes up automatically at http://shape.cs.princeton.edu/search.html - you might try that and see if it works.

I think it should - it was used with the first version of Alice.

LATER NOTE !! Just checked and (1) the version on the Princeton web site doesn't seem to work (may just be very slow) and (2) the download version doesn't work on my PC - in fact it hung up completely and I had to go to Task Manager to shut it down. :mad: Apparently something in the current version of Java isn't compatible with the (eight year old) program. Might be worth a try on a Mac but definitly not recommended for a PC. :o

[nathan3011]

Hi Guys,

Just wondering what the main difference is between Public Liability Insurance (http://www.publicliabilityinsurance.org.uk/) and Pivot and if both of these are free to use??

also, just wondering if you guys based on your experiences which one out of the 2 would you recommend and why?

thanks in advance

[DrJim]

Smooth Teddy was a (very good! :)) research project but don't think it works well with current software (i.e. Vista) so I'd go with Pivot (think it's still free). Haven't tried it recently myself, however.

[dubastot]

If you want to animate with stickfigures. Just animate in pivot. It is good enough.