Moovl – just add imagination

I thought it would be useful to collect some ‘How to’ demonstrations together on one page (some of these will also appear in the main blog).
Comments, suggestions and requests all welcome.

• To read an article about saving your drawings, click here.

How to make a walking spider
This is pretty basic. The physical settings don’t matter too much – as long as the body and legs aren’t too heavy or too sticky.
Each leg is animated in turn.

How to make some slopes and falling rocks
This is also quite simple. The trick is the make sure the slopes are really sticky (10) so they just stick to the screen. They also need to be fairly ‘hard’ (7 to 9) so the rocks bounce off them.
The ‘rocks’ need to be quite heavy so they fall nicely, and they must be quite slippy so they flow, and quite hard so they bounce. I also made them quite loud.

How to make a playing piano
For this one, I first of all drew the piano keys in grey and black. I made them very sticky, so they just stuck to the screen, and quite hard. I gave them a ‘piano’ sound and made them loud.
Next I drew the hands. These needed to be slippy so they moved over the screen easily, and quite soft (so they could pass over the keys), but not too soft (otherwise they wouldn’t ‘hit’ the keys and make the sound).
Finally I animated the hands so they passed over the keys in a loop.

How to make a selection of kinetograms
There are three kinetograms in this sequence.
The first is very easy. The word ’stretch’ is set-up as ‘very tight’ (so the letters stay together) and ‘quite slippy’ (so the letters move when pulled). Then, only the first letter ’s’ is set to ‘very sticky’ so it just sticks to the screen. The other letters can then be pulled to ’s t r e t c h’ out, anchored by the first ’s’.

The second is slightly trickier. I created the word ‘wheee’ as very slippy and very hard. The slide is drawn as very hard and very sticky (so that it just sticks to the screen). Then I created a little ‘hook’ at the top of the slide to keep the word at the top. Delete the ‘hook’ and away you go!

Finally, the third treats four words as separate objects. All have the same weight, but varying degrees of ’slippiness’ depending on the order they should fall down the screen. I then locked them in a cloud (drawn as very hard and very sticky). Delete part of the cloud, and the words fall to the bottom in order.