.Titanium wrote:As a lot of you recently know, Pivot is dying today. Its a good and simple animating program, very useful for those who just started animating. But now, the Pivots are being too "repetitive".

I know that a lot of you disagree with what is said, but if you looked for pivot animations on YouTube after 2009, you will see that Pivot animations have invaded and transformed into DBZ.

Now, most of the pivot animations (animated by those only who are on YouTube) is DBZ, the category is too repetitive. Its always the same thing (movements, powers etc...) We all know that the animator who convinced people animating DBZ, is Jojishi.

Don't think that i am mad at him, but people will NEVER improve by animating DBZ. If they want to do DBZ, animate fullbodies in Flash. Pivot is not made for anime animations.

^ Ok, this is offtopic, but what i said is really serious.

Back on-topic. Flash is beating Pivot right now. We seriously have to do something to revive Pivot.

I've got Sony Vegas one day. But then, Windows told me to restart my laptop. I did. But then, when i was watching my desktop: *poof*. Sony Vegas disappeared :(.

I was very upset of this, my internet is very slow and can't redownload Sony Vegas. It was a very good editing program. Damn Windows Movie Maker. This program makes my animations the shittiest quality ever. On my sig, open the spoiler and go to my YouTube channel. The Pivot video and the Minecraft one was both edited with WMM. The quality is so shitty. That's because of WMM.

Since my internet got faster today. I am going to redownload Sony Vegas on my laptop as soon as i can. ~

You're totally wrong. For as long as I can remember people have always animated Naruto/DBZ/etc styled animations. I don't know where you pulled that fact from that it started in 2009 and Jojishi inspired this 'movement' but it's completely full of shit.

However, I do agree with you that Pivot is repetitive, but not through anime fighting animations, but fighting animations as a whole. Well, pointless fighting. Every time I watch a storylined pivot animation that is centred around fighting I ask to myself 'Why are they fighting?'. They just seem to be doing it for no reason. HEY LOOK A STICKMAN, KAPOW.

That's not saying there needs to be a whole backplot to explain combat between two stickmen, it can be something simple. For example, Pyro Mecha's animation (I think it was the DDC9?) where he chops down a tree and nearly hits another stickmen, and then they fight. That to me was impressive! But two stickmen fighting because one is blue and one is red, or because the other stickman has more exaggerated spiky anime hair is not a reason to fight. It's ok with small, insignificant animations, but not for your 'big projekt i has been wurkin on 4eva'. Stickmen who represent humans are not cat and dog, they don't fight upon natural instinct (terrible analogy I know).

Well yeah, every DDC Pyro Mecha and Olix come with animations that could get a lot of members if they became popular among non-animators. Oblivionfall does a lot for this too, even though he's busy and stuff now.

I myself and trying to get myself to set up some sort of portfolio with animations that hold some sort of plot, have a fun idea behind and and form a storyline. I'm struggling with laziness though, but since that's the only problem I'm coping with, I think I'll be doing just fine :).

Great idea, and, if anything, this will also spread the DD name, and get the forum back to its extremely popular days. I always remember when someone would post something here, and at least 5 replies from different users would be on that post within the first 3-4 hours.

I know this topic is kind of dead, but anyway, it's also the way people react when you use Pivot together with other software.

For example, there's a plug-in for Sony Vegas called Reel Smart Motion Blur, and it adds, well, motion blur. This makes your animations look way smoother, and you could add a background and falling snow in After Effects. Things like that will improve your video, but because it isn't 100% Pivot people will look down on it. And I think that's quite a big of an issue. Flash animators may use Flash only, but they have way more tools, that we need external programs for.

Recently I've being working on methods of improving production speed using a Pivot/Flash hybrid scheme. If you want an animation with high levels of detail, and also camera movements, this can be a life saver. The idea is to create an animation of multiple layers. Each layer is created solely with Pivot, including all backgrounds (besides perhaps the solid 'backsky'). Once you've created all the separate pieces, export them as images, use Adobe Photoshop to make them all transparent, then merge them using Flash.

This can save you a lot of time. Big backgrounds require a lot of stks, which all need to be moved together to create a background movement, which is very time consuming. At the same time, it hides the onionskin, which can be very annoying. If you create the background and the movements separate, then merge them together afterwards, you can eliminate both these problems. It's kinda like using Sprite backgrounds, only you don't have to dirty your pivs with the taint of Pivot 3.

If you have any parts of the background which you wish to loop (running water, perhaps), then create one instance of the loop within the background in Pivot. When importing the background into Flash, you can create a symbol to put all the frames into, and Flash will automatically loop the movement. In this way, you only have to do it once, and not a hundred times.

Likewise, if you have any parts of the background which will be in constant motion (clouds, perhaps), simply create the object and export it individually for its own layer. You can use tweens to move the object the way you want, and this will save a lot of time. If the object you are tweening has any loops involved, simply follow the previous steps to create a symbol, and treat it like any other object.

Another thing that this method can do is allow you to create far better fade effects. All you need to do is draw a massive black square over everything, and create a shape tween in which it goes from opaque to completely transparent. By dragging the beginning and ending frames of the tween across, you can control exactly how long the fade lasts for. Much, much more efficient than the line-fades we see in Pivot animations today.

Now we come to camera movements. Remember that Flash is terrible at resizing images, it makes them look pixelated and crabby. You can avoid this by not resizing any of the images, but you must also be careful with the V-cam too.

When you create the .FLA that you will compile everything onto, you must make sure that the V-cam has the exact same dimensions as the Flash file. That way, it won't automatically resize anything in the final version. For this reason, it is essential that you create all of your backgrounds to be significantly larger than the dimensions you want for your final animation, otherwise the V-cam will have no room to manoeuvre.

Another bonus from animating in this way, is that it allows you to have much more active control over music and audio sync. You will no longer have to muck around, exporting things multiple times in Windows Movie Maker to get sound and music working together. Similarly, you will be able to have direct control over the use of titles, credits, and any other text featured in the animation.

You can still put all the .piv files up for download, as well as the .Fla file. The animation itself will still look entirely like Pivot, and you will have saved an enormous amount of time. I'll show you a preview of my upcoming animation to give you an idea of what it could look like: http://www.swfcabin.com/open/1340836083

^ Incredible. If you happen to have the time, would you ever consider making a video tutorial on using flash and photoshop to compliment pivot?

By the way that looks absolutely amazing

Rez wrote:^ Incredible. If you happen to have the time, would you ever consider making a video tutorial on using flash and photoshop to compliment pivot?

By the way that looks absolutely amazing

I'm way ahead of you man! My plan is that after the animation is complete I'll also make a video explaining all the processes I used and how they can be applied to other animations. I may also include some recordings of me animating on it for full effect.

Oh, and thanks for the compliment on my project! I'm genuinely surprised at how much people are liking my animation at the moment, because honestly I'd not thought it to be that great :0 I guess sometimes it's good to be wrong, haha ;)

I may be late to the party, but I'm really interested in what you got so far Oblivionfall. The link doesn't seem to work anymore.

Cavolia wrote:I may be late to the party, but I'm really interested in what you got so far Oblivionfall. The link doesn't seem to work anymore.

'tis on his thread.

My screen is wide but not very tall. The tallest I can have it at is 660!

Edit at 16/11/12: Let's make that blue, my first post should be blue.