Line Behaviour
Summary
Below are the 6 different line behaviours. If you can't see the animations below, its probably because you have turned off animated gifs within your web browser.
How to Set Line Behaviours
Line behaviours can only be changed from the Edit Window. To change a line behaviour use the right mouse button on the end of the line you want to change. A pop-up menu should appear.
You can also use Keyboard Shortcuts.
Reasons Behind Line Behaviours
Lines can be used to create all kinds of object, limbs, fingers, eye brows, roads, swords...
Most of these things stay the same length throughout an animation. So, when you are animating your figures, you don't want the lengths to change, but you do want to be able to rotate them. This behaviour is called 'Pivot', its the default, and most useful behaviour.
Now imagine a hill, made up of lots of lines joined together to form a rough curve for our stickman to walk over. If there's an earthquake, we may want to move the lines about. But this time we don't want each line to pivot, we don't even want each line staying the same length. In this case, we want 'Independent Behaviour'. This lets us move the ends of the lines wherever we want, and line can be moved independently of the others.
Another behaviour is 'Move'. This works quite similar to 'Independent', except that the rest of the branch is moved as well. Unlike the default 'Pivot', there isn't any rotation going on, and the line can stretch and shrink.
Now for the trickiest, and best behaviour : 'Dual Behaviour'. This is designed specially for arms and legs, but can be used for other things as well. When a stickman runs you want his shin and thigh to stay the same length, so it sounds like Pivot would fit the bill. It does, but if you make the foot 'Dual Behaviour', and the knee Pivot, life if twice as easy. When you move the foot, the knee automagically moves to the correct place. Its called Dual because it moves two things at once, in this case, the foot, and the knee.
Dual comes in three flavours. Normal, Clockwise and Anti-clockwise.
