Stykz

Because I can create many things in it.

Just for fun, I have installed Stykz 1.0.2 (223) on Windows 10 and played around with it.

The 1.0.2 version was released in 2010, according to Help - About. However, the program installed just fine on Windows 10 and ran smoothly. I had no crashed, nor did I discover any bugs.

The help is extensive and concise and is really clarifying operation of the program. It is written by someone who made an effort to explain how it works and how to use it and mentioning the limitations, so you do keep searching for features you are missing.

With or without the help topic, Getting Started - Creating Your First Animation, you will probably find it easy to make a first animation of a stick person walking over the canvas, or stage, as it is called.

So, my general conclusion is that Stykz does what it promises: creating stick animations. However, it will take a lot of effort to even create a simple animation. Basically, your figures are made out of segments and you will have to pay attention to each and every segment in each and every frame to create smooth, natural looking motion. Of course, rigid objects are copied from frame to frame and you can simply drag them to a new position, but a walking person is another matter. You will have to bend arms and legs to the right positions for every frame.

The program has options to stretch, rotate, distort, add and remove segments, so that helps a bit to get the work done, but do not expect any 'magic', like automatic transformations in multiple steps from one frame to another. Also, you create stick animations, and do not get any more than that. If you have ever watched a documentary on how virtual reality is added to movies, you might hope that you can dress up your stick figures with textures or whatever, but such features do not exist.

So, basically, you draw frame after frame, manually bringing in all of the details. The segment manipulation and frame set help a bit and reduces the required effort, in comparison to a plain old vector drawing program, but not a lot.

I you search on the web for animation created with Stykz, you do no find a lot of impressive animations. I suppose the best results can be expected if you add a lot of artistic creativity to the work and do not attempt to create anything realistic.

Pros:

• The GUI looks nice and clean.
• The help is concise and easy to understand.
• Although the release year is 2010, the program was stable and worked smoothly.

Cons:

• It takes at lot of effort to create a simple animation.
• Some useful features are missing, like:
• • Closing polygons.
• • Reordering frames.
• • Font support.