Pikkipi source files

When I was building Pikkipi I had to really scratch around to find useful references for both the Lightwave 3D models and the Director coding.  So I thought maybe people would like to peep inside of the files that make Pikkipi.  They may not be the most perfect implementations but I figure they could be useful.  Also if you make something with them I’d love to see

Here’s the Adobe Director source file that the web version is built using.  You’ll need a recent version of Director:

download pikkipi Director source (zip file)

Here’s the object and scene files used to create the 3D people and their accessories in Lightwave 3D. The models are broken down into separate head, body and accessories (including hair) which are put together in Director.  (it was tricky to do this – I can see why they avoid it in video games)

download 3D Objects (zip file)
download 3D Scenes (zip file)

If you’re interested in bone animation for Director, I found that W3Ds needed only the most basic features of bone animation activated in Lightwave.  Check out the weightmaps on the objects and the rigs in the scene files…

For all these you’ll need the correct software of course.  They both pretty complex software so I wouldn’t recommend digging into these without a little knowledge of them.

Hope this stuff is useful – enjoy!

Pikkipi on ComicDish.com

Apparently the guys on TheDish podcast had a play with Pikkipi and made a couple of simple comics

 

 

 

 

 

You Own What You Make With Pikkipi

A few folks have commented that they weren’t sure whether they had ownership rights of anything they made with Pikkipi.  I want to set the record straight – you have total ownership, there’s no watermarks and there’s no catch.  Enjoy!

Make a Webcomic Without The Need For Drawing Skills!

If you wish to create a webcomic but don’t have drawing skills, Pikkipi does the work for you – it allows you to make up different character models, put them in poses, and compose scenes that can be inserted into a webcomic.

You can add the speech bubbles and frame the shots using any design software – or better yet a comic layout program.  For example, a lot of Apple Macs come with Comic Life which is a very easy tool for laying out panels and text captions (you can get it for Windows too).

If you’re interested in learning more about webcomics, here’s a couple of links to check out:

BuzzComix
DrunkDuck

Posted on DeviantArt

I can’t say I’m a regular visitor of DeviantArt, but I’ve browsed through there on occasion for character artwork and to see how people have done low-polygon 3D models.

I thought I’d put some Pikkipi shots up on there as it seemed a good place – maybe more appropriate even – than Flickr.  

Pikkipi on DeviantArt

…or go to Pikkipi.com itself

Free storyboard software

It occurred to me that Pikkipi could be used as a storyboarding tool – I mean storyboarding as in planning out shots for a movie.  It might be a good option for students and the like who would ideally would want industry software such as FrameForge but don’t have the money to put down and would like a free storyboarding software. 

Here’s a storyboard frame that I knocked up really quickly using Pikkipi.  I added the notes using Keynote, a presentation program on the Mac.  You could probably use all kinds of software to add arrows and annotations, or even the presentation maker in Google Docs.

make a storyboard with Pikkipi here

Getting the character into position

There’s two ways to position the characters in the scene now.  This should make it easy to set up the scene faster without a lot of mouse-dragging, or just to zoom in on the head when you are working on an expression or new face setup.  Here’s the two ways you can move characters around:

 

1. Use the Quick Move buttons.  Clicking one of these will pull the character into a predefined position.  You can also use these buttons if you lose the character off the side of the scene!
    
2. Move with the mouse.  When you click on the scene and drag (hold the mouse button down and move the mouse) you will move the character in the scene.  By default this is a back-forth-left-right movement but if you click a different Mouse Mode icon at the top, you can change the movement to rotating the character or raising/lowering the character. 

You’ll probably find the Quick Move positions good for setting up the character positions quickly, then use the mouse move options to fine tune their place and rotation.

>> Go to Pikkipi now

Make more faces with new head shapes

To add further variety to the types of faces you can create I have added a wide and narrow version of the male and female heads.  In combination with the options for eyebrows, mouth etc. it should now be possible to make some quite unique and characterful faces.  Next I’ll work on some more texture additions for faces – crease lines, that sort of thing.

Here’s a couple of shots using the new face shapes.

Sharing scenes

When you’ve made a scene the next step is to save it to your hard drive via the clipboard.  On the Finish tab the ‘Copy to Clipboard’ button will do exactly that.  

After this, the scene is on the clipboard of your computer and you can do whatever you want with it.  To simply save the scene as a file on your computer’s hard drive, open an image editor.  

If you are using a Mac you can use the Preview program. Start Preview, open the File menu and choose ‘New from Clipboard’.

On Windows you can use Paint.  Open the Paint program, then press Ctrl + V to paste the scene image, or open the Edit menu and choose ‘Paste’.

Now in either program you can Save the image (from the File menu) on your hard drive. 

Once it’s on your hard drive you can do all sorts of stuff… here’s some ideas based on what you’ll find on the web:

• Share it on Flickr – remember to tag it with the word Pikkipi
• Add effects and paint on the scene with an image editor like Picnik
• Add comic effects with FunPix or a program like Comic Life
• Create a Visual Novel (someone tell me if you try this!) 
• Animate it with a soundtrack using something like Slide

made with Adobe Director

I made Pikkipi using Adobe Director, which actually has quite a bit of history. It started off as the thing to make interactive CDs with, back when that was big and the Internet was small. Since then they repurposed it for the web and added a 3d engine. It’s now probably the best web-based 3d you can get with a plugin, and definitely the best known and best supported. Adobe are the people behind Photoshop and Flash, which you are probably very familiar with. It takes a short while for the plugin to load, and after the first time it gets a lot quicker. To be honest, downloading the latest plugin and waiting it to load are a bit more than I’d like but to have it runnable right in your browser is worth it to me.