Koolmoves: Animating GoAnimate Stick Figures, Tweens and Action Script

In this tutorial I show you how to recreate a GoAnimate Stick figure character in order to create your own animated custom stick figure movements with Koolmoves. In the process you'll learn about the role of 'tweens' and put the tiniest of nicks into learning action script so you can stop your animation from continuously looping.

You'll need to have seen at least my first Koolmoves tutorial in order to set up your GoAnimate Character/Prop template file. The second tutorial is optional but will give you an overview of the drawing tools (if you are not familiar with them) and show you the first action you should animate with any completely custom character.

All three parts of tutorial three are embeded below with some additional notes to let you know what each section contains. I know these tutorials are quite long, and I've tried to make them as interesting to watch as possible, but, if animating were easy, quick and simple... well we wouldn't have any need for GoAnimate now would we?

NB: Apologies for the spelling mistake in every video's title (see if you can spot it). My editing software, video preview window is set to low resolution so text can be very hard to read and mistakes even harder to spot. Noticing the mistake after 9 hours waiting for the tutorial to process, I figure it's not that important of an issue to spend another 9 hours processing just to fix it.


Tutorial 3, Part 1

In part 1 I explain how I created my copy of a GoAnimate Stick figure character. I show you, in detail, how he is drawn so you can easily recreate your own version. Next I show you my drawing sequence for an animated kick that I will be tracing to create my new custom action and start to trace my second key frames.

Important!: In Koolmoves, when creating key frames Always start with a copy of one of your other key frames so Koolmoves can track the changing positions of the line points across each frame. (If you draw every key frame from scratch then Koolmoves can't keep track of the line points and will not be able to calculate tweens).




Tutorial 3, Part 2

With my two key frames I introduce 'Onion skinning' and the concept of 'tweens' by adding in 12 tweens between my two key frames and demonstrating the results when the movie is played. I then continue on creating more key frames and demonstrate how that affects the tweening.




Tutorial 3, Part 3

Finally I set up my animation sequence as it will be imported into GoAnimate complete with the correct number of tweens between each frame. I then show you how to stop your sequence from continuously looping with the tiniest bit of Action Script. The tutorial concludes with a demonstration of how my custom action looks when imported into GoAnimate's studio.




If you have any questions about the tutorial feel free to ask away in the comments below. I also appreciate general feedback too. I'd love to know if you're finding these tutorials interesting, useful, boring etc. I do put a lot of time into the editing to try and keep things moving along without going so fast that you miss out on important information.