Cutout puppets

Cutout animation, the way a hand does it: a character built from parts, each turning about its own joint, posed by hand and captured to a frame.

Make the parts #

Draw each limb or piece on a layer of its own.
In the Puppet panel, make each layer a part. It leaves the frame and becomes a piece of its own, drawn exactly where it was.
Hang each part from the one it moves with: an arm from the torso, a forearm from the arm. It hangs where it is drawn, so the character does not change, pixel for pixel.

Draw part #

In Draw part the canvas shows one part, with every tool. Its joint (where it turns) and its sockets (where other parts hang) are marks you click into place or drag. A joint is put in the middle of a pixel, so a quarter turn sends every pixel to a pixel and a limb posed at 90 degrees is the limb turned, exactly.

Pose #

In Pose the canvas shows the whole puppet.

Click a part to pick it. The ring round its joint turns it; Shift gives steps of 15 degrees, so a limb stops on 90.
The square on the root moves the whole puppet by whole pixels.
Capture pose makes a frame of it after the one showing, and the next capture goes after that: pose, capture, pose, capture.

A captured frame is the parts' own shapes placed where the pose put them, not a picture of them, and after that a frame like any other, to fix by hand. Each part is a row of the timeline, the same in every capture.

Good to know #

Turning or flipping the canvas turns the puppet and every capture with it.
A puppet is built from the engine's own pivots, sockets and attachments, and the pose each frame was captured from is written on it. A program that animates puppets itself (Sprit's'pract) opens a Fast puppet as it is.
A document may have up to 256 parts.

See also Animation for what to do with the frames you capture.

This is the guide that ships inside the program (F1).