is designed and programmed by Bernhard Schulenburg. For questions or comments please mail to (bernhard.schulenburg@yahoo.com)

about. takakukei animator is a polygon animation tool. It allows you to generate polygon-based animations for games or movies. In case you're wondering, takakukei is the japanese word for shape or polygon.

Below is a screen-shot of the app in action. Can you use it with your Operating System? Yes you can! It's fully programmed in Java, so you need to have a Java Runtime Environment installed (see sun's java homepage for more info on java.) Takakukei Animator works quite nicely. There are some little things, where usability could be better, but it's generally in good working condition. If you want to use it, ask me for the newest version and a tutorial and I'll write one up for you, quickly. It would be awsome for me to see you make a game using this flat polygon animation. If you want to load a takakukei animation into your game, you will need a specific java class, that I'll hand over to you. You can either use this java class directly (if your game runs on java) or you'd have to reprogram the thing in whichever language you're using. It's pretty short code, though. Maybe 150 lines at most. I worked on this animation tool, because originally I wanted to make an adventure game with this polygon optics. But once I got the tool ready to work, I kind of lost interest in the original idea of making the game. Maybe I'll save it for a future project. But if you feel like using it, yes you can!

Also I'll hand out the sources, if you feel like working on it. (Getting new features involved, etc...)

Further below you'll find a launch link. It will start takakukei animator via java web start. You can try it out. For drawing a Polygon you have to use the Poly tool button and click your Polygon points together. Press ENTER to finish up the Polygon. Pressing ENTER will reconnect the poly's last point to the first.




help index
(1) About takakukei animator
(2) Animation
(3) Tools
(4) Layers
(5) Frames
(6) Movies
(7) Images
(8) Color Pallettes
(9) How to use takakukei editor
(10) Known Issues
(11) To Do List
(12) User Requests


launch takakukei





animation. When the application starts up you can either start right off working on an empty canvas. You can also save your canvas, get a good night's sleep and continue your work the next day. What I am saying is: [Animation]->[New] will open a new empty canvas. [Animation]->[Save As] will save your current Animation. When naming your file, keep in mind that files need the ending ".sav". [Animation]->[Open] will open a file chooser interface. Just pick your file and click open.

tools. When takakukei editor starts up, you will see several windows. Each window contains a set of functions. In order to get your work done (that is: creating mind blasting animations using cool simplistic polygon technique) you will use each of the windows. One of the windows is called the Canvas. It displays your current animation frame. Another window is headed by "construction tools". In this window you can select various tools, each of which allows you to manipulate a polygon in one way or another. For example, say you want to first draw a polygon, and then rotate it, because you think it should be a little more slanted to your favorite side. This task would be performed in three steps. First you'd have to use the "poly"-tool. Push the button saying "poly". Then move the mouse cursor over to the Canvas window, the big white window in the middle. Start drawing your polygon point by point, click by click and when you had enough press [ENTER].

There. You should be seeing your first Polygon on the canvas. It will be black, as the default color is set to black. (You can change this on the color pallette left, just one click on any color.)

So now we said we wanted to rotate. In order to do that you need to specify which of your polygon's vertices you want to include into the rotation. Choose "select" on the construction tools window. Navigate the mouse cursor to the canvas and open a selection rectangle (by pressing the left mouse button). With the selection rectangle grab all the vertices you wish and release the mouse button. The vertices will be marked by little blue points. Now you can go on to the main thing. Push the "rotate" button. When you left-press in the canvas and pull the mouse cursor to the left or right you will rotate the set of blue marked vertices. And that's that. That is how you rotate about in takakukei. But before you wind up spinning all over the place I would like to let you know, that resizing is done pretty much the same way, analogously to rotation. First you select the vertices, then you push the "scale" button and finally you change the vertices on the canvas. The "translate" button works pretty much the same way. Select your vertices and perform the translation by dragging the mouse over the canvas.
The "color" tool allows you to select from any color of the RGB spectrum. This can be helpful if you quickly need a color that the current pallette doesn't display and you find it too irritating to generate a new pallette.


layers. The layers window shows all your layers. You might ask yourself what exactly does this guy mean by "layer"? A layer allows you to keep your canvas in order. Each polygon belongs to exactly one layer. A layer however can hold multiple polygons. If you want to manipulate a specific polygon you need to make sure that first you select the layer that holds the polygon. Then if you drop a selectoin rectangle over a group of polygons, only the ones in the currently activated layer will be selected.
Each newly generated polygon will be attached to the currently active layer. You can add new layers in the menu [Layers] of the canvas menu bar. Also you can delete layers ([Layers] -> [Kill Layer]). Another thing you can do is switch the visibility of a layer on or off. In the layer window move the mouse cursor over the eye symbol and click left to toggle visibility. An invisible layer will not show it's polygons. Try it out. Reorder the layers via drag and drop in the layer list window as you deem neccessary. Now you know every function related to layers. A good way to use layers if for example you want to generate an animation of a running girl is to reserve one layer for each main body part. That's one layer for the left arm, one for the right, one for the head, one for the torso, one for each leg, and so on. You could also split the arm and hands into three or even more layers. This way it becomes easy to control the animation process, because you can select and manipulate every body part individually.

frames. Frames are absolutely neccessary for making things move. A smooth animation would probably need around twenty frames per second. You can add new frames via the menu bar ([Frames] -> [New Frame]) or you can delete them via [Frames]->[Kill Frame]. You can activate a frame by clicking the left mouse button on it's box in the frame window, the long one, top of the screen. Clicking it results in an update of the canvas. It now displays the content of the currently active frame. There is another thing you can do with frames. This aditional function is explained in the section "Images".

movies. You can view your animation in action by opening the movie player ([Movie]->[Open Player]). It will automatically load the animation you were currently working on. Or if you wish you can manually open a different animation ([Animation]->[Open]). You can pause and continue the movie ([start],[stop]). Also you can set the execution speed in the menu [Set Delay].

images. You can use images in the background of the canvas to help you with drawing polygons. Each frame can show one image. This way you can use stills from a filmed video as a guide for the outlines. See the example movie "example.sav". It was made using still frames from a film as a guide. You can set the image of a frame via [Frames]->[Set Image]. You can toggle visibility of the image by setting [Frames]->[Show Image].

color pallettes. Sometimes you're working e.g. on a forest theme movie and you need lots of green hues. Then you would want to save all these hues in a color pallette. Go to [Colors]->[New Color Pallette]. A color chooser dialog will open and you can click on every color you would like to have saved in your new pallette. When you're done selecting colors name your pallette and save it. Pallette file names should have the ending ".pallette".