Piga Animator/Manual

The following page is in development and is by no means official documentation of Piga Software at this time. Many of the concepts stated are experimental and have yet too be verified.

This is the manual for Piga Animator, a free software 2D computer animation tool focusing on procedural animation, digital puppetry and machininma. This contrasts it with other tools such as Pencil2D for frame-by-frame animation and Synfig or KToon for vector animation. However, Animator is also being designed to be capable of taking in graphics and animations created in other programs designed for more detailed work, for areas where a mixed-media approach would work better.

Actors
Character movement is handled in a similar fashion to 2D game engines, with modes for the actor for each of the cardinal and ordinal/diagonal orientations. The actor can be treated as a single unit, with sprites provided accordingly, or as a system of individual parts as follows, each with their own animations. Animator is not yet designed for full skeletal animation (requiring more advanced physics and vector rotation than available in Gambas at present), but does divide the body into a selection of overlays to be created in other tools. The base unit is the torso/trunk, which then has protrusions for the various limbs, and then the head, which has separate overlays for the eyes and mouth.

Left/Right Arm
Two overlays are provided, with which one being controlled changed by clicking again on the overlay selection button.


 * None
 * Limp
 * Shrug
 * Grab
 * Punch
 * Stop


 * Grab Up
 * Grab Down
 * Clap
 * Hold
 * Salute

Left/Right Leg
Two overlays are provided, with which one being controlled changed by clicking again on the overlay selection button.

Head
Facial expressions in Animator work through the combined poses of the eyes and mouth, and work somewhat similar to the actual Facial Action Coding System, only considerably simplified closer to the level of emoticons.


 * None
 * Forward
 * Backward
 * Left
 * Right
 * Front-Left
 * Front-Right
 * Back-Left
 * Back-Right

Eyes
Both eyes are contained in one object, though a cross-eyed mode is available to overcome this if necessary. The eye overlay is actually made up of two objects that are controlled in tandem: the base eyeball, which directs where the character is looking, and then the eyelid which is used to define mood. Different moods are produced through the combinations of the various mouths in order to produce complete facial expressions. As part of idling, the eyes are by default set to blink at odd intervals.

Eyeball
 * None (removes the entire set of eyes)
 * Look Forward
 * Look Up
 * Look Down
 * Look Left
 * Look Right
 * Up-Left
 * Up-Right
 * Down-Left
 * Down-Right
 * Cross-eyed

Eyelid
 * Shock
 * Shut
 * Vehement
 * Serene
 * Stare
 * Wince (used as half-pose for blinking)
 * Bewildered
 * Wistful
 * Glare
 * Concentrate
 * Tears

Mouth
As with the eyes, the mouth works in tandem with its other facial counterpart in order to produce particular expressions. A frown or a smirk can greatly change the portrayed by the side shock/wide eyes. A peculiarity of the mouth compared the the eyes is that each pose also requires it has its own version of mouth movements, or else it will default to the neutral mouth movement series.


 * None
 * Neutral
 * Frown
 * Smile
 * Smirk
 * Grin
 * Grit
 * Cringe
 * Gape
 * Pucker
 * Sneer
 * Razz


 * Snarl?
 * Tongue rolling?
 * Gurn?
 * Duchenne smile?

Posing
In order to bring together a complete expression of character, these various bits and pieces have to coordinated into the overall pose intended. Emotions can be expressed just as much through posture, the tilt of the head or the position of the arms as they can through the eyes and mouth.

Directing
Directing in animation is a little bit different than directing a live-action production. While a film director takes already given assets, such as actors, props and sets, and is in charge of arrangement, timing and effects such as lighting and angle of shots, an animation director needs to take a more hands-on approach while the frames are being drawn.

Note: a novel feature of Animator is the ability to select a mode that allows for dynamic described video using text-to-speech.

Scripting
This system records your inputed actions and allows you to replay perviously played out scenes, as well as to correct and tweak the timing of the sequence.

Capture
Live capture to video is done via the ffmepg system through capturing the animations displayed on screen, at every average 480p resolution, covering both standard and wide-screen resolutions; high definition support may be added later on.

Animation
The most fundamental ideas of animation were encapsulated by Disney animators Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas in their twelve basic principles of animation, and reviewing these remains a good starting point. From here, we shall outline in detail a few essential principles required for masterful use of Animator. Many of these concepts were learned by designer Graham L. Wilson as he developed this program, all while thinking about how to make these work in real-time through automation or procedure.

Note: for help tweening your animations, please refer to the Synfig documentation.

Characters
Character design is one of the most important aspects of creating an animated production, and usually begins with the creation of a model sheet in order to define a character's proportions, appearance, apparel, accessories and even body language and emotional attitudes. A full turn around or model rotation sheet is used in order to define a character's appearance from various angles.

Cartoon Style
One of the most common designs in animation dating back to the early Walt Disney and Warner Bros features, this style is designed to be created in such a way as to avoid realism and the uncanny valley. Heads are large compared to the rest of the body, allowing for exaggerated facial features. Arms and legs are the same length for simplicity, and hands can be large, and often are drawn with only four fingers again to make easier to draw. Given that in traditional animation, every single frame had to be redrawn from scratch, it was important to simplfy characters to a degree to make it manageable; as it has been with fast-produced comic strips.

Proportionate Style
More realistic drawing is based on the study of actual body proportions, which of course vary from person to person but have been relatively standardized for beginners. The average male is eight heads tall while a female is seven heads tall.

Idling
Even within limited animation, the illusion or motion is best preserved if nothing remains still on the screen for too long. Animator has a selection of pre-coded idling animation modes which can be drawn for actors. All of these may also be called by the puppeteer in order to be completed with certain timing.

With limited animation, it can be tempting to just try and do all exposition as dialogue, especially if you have a system of obscuring or automating mouth movement, however a little motion can do wonders to enhancing a scene. For example, after an important revelation through spoken words, a slight movement or gesture on the part of the character can attract the audience's attention further and/or reinforce its importance.

Blinking
This idling mode is activated by default, and simply causes the character to blink periodically.

Sniffing
A default sound effect is provided, which can be customized to a given voice actor.

Shrugging
A raising of the arms and shoulders as a basic shrug.

Sighing
A default sigh sound effect is provided, male and female, which can be customized to a given voice actor.

Twitches
Causes various applicable components to translate slightly, to simulate muscle contraction.

Head Turns
Based on the given perspective, this mode will have the head occasional turn in a different direction (but never a full 360 degrees!).

Walk Cycle
The walk cycle is one of the most fundamental concepts in animation, usually taught to aspiring animators soon after the bouncing ball (handled in Animator, though procedural techniques). It can be achieved through any number of combinations of frames (usually to build up to 24 or 30 FPS), but here we will start with two and then double it through until we hit sixteen (the typical frame-rate of high-end traditional animation; a full thirty frames-per-second is possible, but best left for tweening).

''Note: As part of the principle of squash and stretch, a walk cylce is supposed to have a figure highest in the air during high point and lowest with recoil. Animator has a mode which simulates these translations automatically, allowing walk cycles to be done in the same frame size.''

Two Framed
Used commonly in 8-bit era video games. There is one frame to represent the contact of both legs against the ground, with it made not to imply that one leg is over the other and so function as a trick of the eye, as well as the standing pose. When played rapidly and with enough relative obscurity even this limited technique can be adequately convincing.

Four Framed
Used commonly in 16-bit era video games. This expands upon the contact frame used in two frame animation, this time adding two for both legs (with proper dominance given to one or the other), as well as passing poses as both legs go beside the other.

Eight Framed
Usually considered a decent enough target for web animations. Adds two more frames: recoil and high-point for each leg.

Sixteen Framed
Usually the target for professional level animation, though higher still can be achieved.

Mouth Movement
''Note: In addition to the various mouth movements, an additional option with regard to character speech is to allow it to be displayed as text in speech bubbles. This being particularly useful to those without access to voice acting, and desiring something less artificial than text-to-speech, which is also provided via the eSpeak system.''

Amplitudinal
In many anime, owing to the legacy of limited animation from Osamu Tezuka, mouth movement is handled merely as the opening and closing of the lips and jaw, without any special phontic mouth shapes. This movement is then tied to the amplitude (or, in laymen's terms, loudness) of the voice at any given time, producing a convincing, if unrealistic, effect sometimes known as "lip flap". There is another advantage to this style however, and one that no doubt aids its usage in anime - this simplified representation is largely language neutral, making it more convincing upon placing over a foreign dub; this is also commonly expolited in AMVs. The technique is also used in other low-end animation productions, such as the works of Filmation.

The design of a lap flap is based on creating a simulation of the human lips. The angle or expression dictates the shape and whether or not teeth will be shown. If the expression is a smirk or smile for example, as opposed to a grin, the upper lip will raise a bit when talking. In a grin, cringe, gritted teeth or similar the upper lip has already been raised, and so it will not move. From here the most important thing is making the lower jaw drop by the right amount. This is typically divided into two frames: one for a slight opening, representing emissions of comparatively low amplitude, and a longer one for louder speech. A third one for a full out yell may also be added. The mouth may also get wider as the jaw is lowered, stretching the edges of the lips.

Phonetic
See Also: Papagayo

Considered the most realistic form of mouth animation, Animator automates this normally arduous task (though not neccesairly with full accuracy) through the use of a speech-to-text back-end. To accomplish its task, it transcribes the spoken audio from the voice file, transforms it into a text string and then calculates what phonetic pose the mouth of the character should form for each letter at given intervals. The animator thus needs to create each of these poses for the given actor.

Importing
Animator is not a graphics editor and it is presumed that all source material used in Animator will be created in other specialized raster or vector tools such as KolourPaint, MyPaint, Pinta, GIMP or Inkscape. There are a couple of things that should be borne in mind when importing graphics into Animator. First off is that every frame of a sample animation must be an independent file, and that animated GIFs, APNGs or MNGs are not applicable. The same applies in vector for SVG animation. Synfig allows for the export of tweened animation as a series of individual image files.

Another important consideration is that Animator assumes that every frame has the same width and height. This is important in order to keep the applied transformations by Animator proportionate to the various source images. If there is a varying amount of background space, certain frames may appear squashed or stretched. Although an image does not strictly need to be transparent to be used in Animator, it limits the amount of compositing (such as with the background and overlay options) that can be done.

Supported image formats include GIF, PNG, JPEG, SVG files. Audio files supported include Ogg Vorbis, FLAC and, codecs allowing, MP3. MIDI and WAV are also supported by lack duration detection, which is used to automatically time mouth movements. The two art styles Animator was designed in mind for are pixel art and vector art, although any image with transparent bordering can conceivably be used.