Sit down (four legs)

Sitting down for four legs: the rear comes down onto the folded back legs while the front stays up on straight legs, the paws staying exactly where they stood.

A cartoon person and a dog tipping its rear down, front legs staying straight.

Use it in a cartoonOpen it in the block editorThe pack file (JSON)

What it is for

Sit down (four legs) is the sit-down of the nine game cycles, written for the fours set: a four-legged sit is the body turned about its standing legs, which the renderer plants, rather than a hip and a knee bending the way the upright set's sit-down does. The program itself drives only the torso, head and tail; the legs stay exactly where the renderer puts them.

The principle it shows: staging

Nothing here moves the legs at all. Tipping the torso back, dropping the head and lifting the tail is the whole motion, and that is enough: the eye reads a dog or a cat sitting down from the torso's own tilt alone, without the program needing to separately pose every joint of every leg. Staging is choosing what the audience needs to see; here, that turns out to be very little.

The program, line by line

settings: h = 540, leg = 0.33, on = 0
when it starts
  show the side view
  glide torso 34, head -16, tail 16, dy (-0.01*h) over 0.7 s (smooth)

Try this

  1. Tip the torso 50 degrees instead of 34. The rear drops much further down, a deeper sit.

    In the program: ramp · to.part:torso 34 → 50

  2. Take 1.2 seconds to sit instead of 0.7. The sit becomes a slow, deliberate lowering instead of a quick one.

    In the program: ramp · over 0.7 → 1.2

How it differs from Sit down and Sit (four legs)

Sit down is the upright set's version, bending a hip and a knee the program itself drives. Sit (four legs) is the held pose this move settles into once it finishes.

Works on

Worked out by the build: it plays the move in the engine on each body and checks what moves on screen. Nobody types this table.
BodyMoves?What moves
2 legs (a person)yeswhole body, turns, body, head, arms
4 legs (a dog)yeswhole body, body, head, back legs, tail, ears
no legs (the monster with no legs)yeswhole body, turns, body, arms, tail, ears

c4c:beh:sit_down_fours · version 1.0.0 · c4c-free · by Jabbertoon