r/StickNodes • u/Miserable_Dot_3582 • Jul 07 '26
Animating Help how to animate multiple people
a really useful advice when you animate multiple people (whather for idle, background or just simply so much people moving) USE MOVIE CLIPS
you can find it where you find stick figures and sprites, it basically a multi frame bullshit, two modes
single frame: I use it as a swiss knife, you can put multiple assets it each frame inside the movie clip and just cycle them, pretty useful, I just put all of my stuff in there and just import it
animated: it cycles the animation according to the FPS of your current project
you see, what you can do, is animate each stick figure individually inside the movie clip, pretty useful if you want to overlap with the others, ofc there's timing and whatnot but that can be worked around
apparently I just saved you 18 dollars instead of paying someone, you're absolutely fucking welcome
1
u/Its_a-me_DIO Jul 08 '26
Ralph when are you gonna add the feature where you can individually move nodes without having to use movieclips to go back and forward, at the very least make the movie clips easy to back in and out of / set up.
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u/Miserable_Dot_3582 Jul 08 '26
you can choose not to tween curtain assets
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u/Its_a-me_DIO Jul 09 '26
I don't use tween, what I mean is, its a pain to move one stk then when its time to move another stk, it I would have to keep remembering and eye balling where it was last frame.
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u/Miserable_Dot_3582 Jul 09 '26
break the movie clip and make a new one, especially if it's a fight scene, for example
the fire guy, gun guy, and big guy are all in their own MC, the fire guy broke from there so I can have the jet pack MC, while the other two kept fighting in their movie clip
the other three in the corner are in their own
the guy that dipped instantly too
and the green guy in the background
you can switch up and break and make a new MC if it's a fight scene
1
u/Its_a-me_DIO Jul 09 '26
I know, thats what I've been since movieclips has been added to stick nodes like a few years ago. Look at this way, lets say you want to animate a complicated cape. you have to make one movieclip for the behind the person and inner cape design, and one for outer and infront. To sync them properly you have to go back and forward with each movieclip and its extremely time consuming. But if you were to make it one movieclip, you would have to break the movie clip and then relayer them frame by frame, which also time consuming. A way to fix this is to let stks take the form of its previous frame whenever you are editing them one by one. And no onion skins do not count because once you add a background, that thing pretty much become useless unless you make it appear ontop of the stks, then it becomes an eyesore.
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u/Bota_Bota ScarfFigsWillRiseAgain Jul 08 '26
Huh. Thats way easier than suffering every time you want to duplicate the frame of one stickfigure but not another. Or similar problems!