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When stick figures fought

animationobsessive.substack.com

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Re: When stick figures fought

#101

Post by wpm »

enricozb wrote: post #21

I used to make animations with https://pivotanimator.net/ a lot as a kid, trying to make fight scenes like these. A sort of related thing is ToriBash, which is kind of a multiplayer 3D animation game where you fight each other by making decisions on which muscles to contract at each time interval. Loved this stuff so much. I miss my summers off from school, where I would never think of a day gone as time "spent".

I still have a bunch of .piv files on a CD backup I burned on my PC right before I switched to an iMac G5 in the summer of 2007. I should fire Pivot again and reminisce. If I recall correctly, they were absolutely crude and incredibly poorly done.

Re: When stick figures fought

#102

Post by cess11 »

hangonhn wrote: post #98
anymouse123456 wrote: post #57

I owe my technology career to Flash. Still find it incredibly sad that Adobe and Steve Jobs were able to destroy it together. This tool was able to draw in creative, previously non-technical people and provide a gradual ramp of complexity that we could navigate. Nothing has come close since.

Flash was a poorly written piece of software. It had numerous bad memory leaks and a CPU hog. It was never allowed on the iPhone probably because it would have drained the batteries really quickly. On top of that HTML5 was starting to catch on and could eventually do everything Flash could and do it better without the memory leaks and poor CPU usage. I have the very unfortunate claim to the title of being an engineer…

None of that matters for the kind of creative work the grand parent likely had in mind.

Perhaps there was a memory leak in Unidentified Flying Assholes or the endless line of punch-a-celeb games or the thousands of stick fight productions and so on, but no one cared and enjoyed them immensely anyway. You could do something cool without ever learning about things like memory leaks or vulnerabilities in the underlying platform.

Re: When stick figures fought

#103

Post by nidnogg »

enricozb wrote: post #21

I used to make animations with https://pivotanimator.net/ a lot as a kid, trying to make fight scenes like these. A sort of related thing is ToriBash, which is kind of a multiplayer 3D animation game where you fight each other by making decisions on which muscles to contract at each time interval. Loved this stuff so much. I miss my summers off from school, where I would never think of a day gone as time "spent".

Toribash is awesome! I last checked it a year ago but it was still alive then [1]. Worth checking out still. People who were great at it back in the day were legitimately doing dark arts with the tools the game came with. I wonder if we'll have an era of appreciation and rediscovery for pre-AI software.

[1] - https://www.toribash.com/

Re: When stick figures fought

#105

Post by dpark »

SeanDav wrote: post #88

> Zhu initially won in court. Then the appeals process ran until 2006, when he finally lost. The stick figures were too different, according to the judges, and the imagery was too simple to copyright. Nike was in the clear. I am sure if I add an extra couple of pixels to the end of the Nike Swoosh, I can use it for my own branding everywhere, because it is not the same and a rounded tick is just too simple to copyrig…

I’m not clear what the case against Nike was. Zhu did not create stick men. He wasn’t even the first to publish “stick fight” videos. He filed a trademark of some sort but you can’t take ownership over an entire class of art based on a trademark. Disney can stop me from using Mickey Mouse in my ads. They can’t stop me from animating a mouse.

Re: When stick figures fought

#106

Post by as1mov »

anymouse123456 wrote: post #57

I owe my technology career to Flash. Still find it incredibly sad that Adobe and Steve Jobs were able to destroy it together. This tool was able to draw in creative, previously non-technical people and provide a gradual ramp of complexity that we could navigate. Nothing has come close since.

Same here, I somehow acquired a pirated copy of Flash when I was 10 or 11. Went through the included offline manual and within a few days somehow knew I'll probably end up doing this programming thing for the rest of my life :D

It's sad what happened to Flash, sure we have plugin free interactive content using JS but I'm not sure if anything has replicated the IDE. Though I guess the decline can also be attributed to the users moving onto other platforms. The kids making games moved on to making Android/iOS games and the animators moved to Youtube.

Re: When stick figures fought

#107

Post by hermitcrab »

SeanDav wrote: post #88

> Zhu initially won in court. Then the appeals process ran until 2006, when he finally lost. The stick figures were too different, according to the judges, and the imagery was too simple to copyright. Nike was in the clear. I am sure if I add an extra couple of pixels to the end of the Nike Swoosh, I can use it for my own branding everywhere, because it is not the same and a rounded tick is just too simple to copyrig…

Nike come out of the whole thing pretty badly. Why didn't they just pay him a few thousand dollars to do the work?

Re: When stick figures fought

#108

Post by pksebben »

Flash animation isn't dead, it's just called source filmmaker now. Whether 'skibidi toilet' is an upgrade from stick death is an argument that i'm sure lives on either side of the generation gap, but amateur internet filmmaking is unquestionably alive and well.

Re: When stick figures fought

#109

Post by [deleted] »

cess11 wrote: post #102
hangonhn wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flash was a poorly written piece of software. It had numerous bad memory leaks and a CPU hog. It was never allowed on the iPhone probably because it would have drained the batteries really quickly. On top of that HTML5 was starting to catch on and could eventually do everything Flash could and do it better without the memory leaks and poor CPU usage. I have the very unfortunate claim to the title of being an engineer…

None of that matters for the kind of creative work the grand parent likely had in mind. Perhaps there was a memory leak in Unidentified Flying Assholes or the endless line of punch-a-celeb games or the thousands of stick fight productions and so on, but no one cared and enjoyed them immensely anyway. You could do something cool without ever learning about things like memory leaks or vulnerabilities in the underlying…

[deleted]

Re: When stick figures fought

#110

Post by avandekleut »

enricozb wrote: post #21

I used to make animations with https://pivotanimator.net/ a lot as a kid, trying to make fight scenes like these. A sort of related thing is ToriBash, which is kind of a multiplayer 3D animation game where you fight each other by making decisions on which muscles to contract at each time interval. Loved this stuff so much. I miss my summers off from school, where I would never think of a day gone as time "spent".

I remember spending hours and hours on pivot and forums like droidz.org which used to host animations, models, and forums. I even remember learning about "easing" and different "levels" of animation and collabs as showcased on darkdemon.org[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkqDoAYKG4A

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