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Haiku Animation



A Haiku is a short Japanese poem used to evoke images. Our Haiku generator lets you choose a few words then it automatically counts the syllables and brings in synonyms where necessary, to help fit the 5-7-5 poetic style. Play as Haiku and dash, slash and grapple your way through a world full of different areas waiting to be explored, each filled with different enemies, bosses and surroundings. The game features beautiful and atmospheric 8-bit pixel art. Everything is drawn by hand and animated frame-by-frame to achieve that retro Metroidvania look.

Animation is one of the main features of Haiku Animator, and the heart of creating animations in Animator is the Timeline. Using a combination of the Timeline and Stage, you can move and transform elements in your component over time, with the result being. animation!


Think of it like this: While the Stage shows what each element in your project looks like as it animates, the Timeline depicts how the elements' properties change.

The Stage is pretty self-explanatory — especially if you're familiar with a drawing tool like Sketch.

But the Timeline may seem intimidating if you're new to animation. Don't be scared! We'll do our best to make it as accessible and familiar as possible. (If you've used Adobe After Effects, Flash, or even Final Cut, then you're probably already familiar with the idea.)


THINKING LIKE AN ANIMATOR

It's helpful, first of all — especially if you're just starting out — to try to get into the mindset of an animator.

To think like an animator means to think about what elements will look like at various points in time, and then how those elements will transition between one point in time and the next.

In more technical terms, the same idea could be expressed as this question: How does the X position or the Y position of some element change over the span of 1 second?

Using the Timeline, you can precisely control the answer.


TIMELINE - OVERVIEW

The Timeline consists of a few fundamental pieces:

  • A list of all of the elements currently on stage
  • Beneath each element heading, a list of the element's properties
  • Property input fields showing the value for each property
  • Keyframes and transitions, which show how values change over time
  • A ticker, which represents the current point in time being edited


TIMELINE - ANATOMY

Stepping back and taking a wider view, this is the overall anatomy of the Timeline. (These terms are defined visually here for clarity when they're referenced elsewhere in the docs.)


HOW TIMELINE AND STAGE INTERACT

To understand how the Timeline and Stage interact, let's look at how a simple design (a heart, as shown here) moves around on the stage when animations have already been defined on the timeline.

When the ticker is at frame 0, the heart is shown on the stage at its initial position (150, 168). Bypass cpanel license check.

If we press the play button and wait until frame 10 is reached, we see that the heart jumps to a new position, (211, 217). That's because frame 10 is marked as a keyframe for a change in the position.x and position.y properties of the element.

Haiku animation backgrounds

Keep playing, and soon the ticker will reach frame 15. The heart's position jumps again, this time to the position (288, 97). As you can see, there are two more keyframes defined at frame 15, which explains the jump to the new position.

The keyframes at frame 15 indicate the beginning of a transition (or tween) for the position.x and position.y properties. Thus, instead of jumping instantly from the baseline position (288, 97), the heart will slide smoothly between until it reaches the destination position (84, 119).

Each transition is associated with an easing curve, which designates what the smooth movement between the two values should look like. There are many easing curves to choose from, but we'll cover those later.


INTERACTING WITH THE TIMELINE

When you drag the timeline ticker left or right, you're changing the current time.

Any changes you make while the ticker is at a certain position will affect the values (keyframes) specifically at that time.

Once you've affected values at two such points in time (i.e., created keyframes), you can then create a transition to have Animator automatically ease between the values. Experiment with different easing curves to finesse your animations!

Advanced: Animating along curves
While we plan to support custom, visual animation along paths in the future, there's a lot you can do with Animator today. Since you can animate X and Y position separately, try out different easing curves for each of X and Y positions. For example, if you animate linear with X and ease in > quadratic with Y, you can plot half of a parabola (then ease out > quadratic with Y while continuing linearly with X to plot the other half.) You can do the same thing with sin, circ, bounce, and any number of other transitions to create complex parametric path animations.


USING THE STAGE TO CREATE KEYFRAMES

If you drag an element across the stage at a point in time, keyframes will automatically be created at that time. That is, dragging an element on stage is exactly the same as editing the X Position and Y Position properties in the at that point in time!

Both techniques are 'windows' into the same underlying data.

In fact, both of these techniques also have exactly the same outcome as editing the values manually in the code — which you can read more about under Advanced: Editing Animator projects as Code.


USING PROPERTY INPUTS TO CREATE KEYFRAMES

First, move the ticker to frame 10, then double click the 'rotation' value to focus the input:

Then, change the value to the desired rotation value, and press Enter to save the value. Keyframes for the value 1.234 will be created at that point in time:


Writing expressions in property inputs

Property inputs can contain more than just simple values. They can be little snippets of code that we call expressions. A la Microsoft Excel, just begin your property input value with an equals sign, and the input will recognize that you're typing in an expression.

Expressions are a powerful tool and there's a lot you can do with them, so we've covered them in detail in the expressions guide.


CREATING OR EDITING A KEYFRAME

New keyframes are automatically created when you:

  1. advance the ticker to a new point in time and then
  2. change properties on the stage (e.g. by resizing or moving an element) or numerically in the properties panel.

You can also create a keyframe by right-clicking on any property in the timeline and selecting 'Create Keyframe'.


To move a keyframe itself, simply click and drag to the left or right.

To edit the value of a keyframe, simply align the ticker over the keyframe, then edit the property visually on stage (e.g. drag the object), or numerically via the property inputs (e.g. change the value in the input field to the desired value).


CREATING OR EDITING A TRANSITION/TWEEN

Once you've created two keyframes (there's always a keyframe at the first frame) you can create a Transition. Animator will then ease between the values of the two keyframes, along the Easing Curve that you specify.

To create a transition, right-click between two keyframes, then choose 'Create Tween' > and select your desired curve.

After creating a transition, you can always modify it by right-clicking on the transition and choose one of the following two options:

  • 'Change Tween >': lets you select a curve from a set of predefined curves.
  • 'Edit Bezier Curve' >: lets you create a customized Cubic Bezier Curve.


ZOOMING WITH THE TIMELINE

You can zoom in or out with the timeline by dragging either end of the horizontal scroll bar. Notice the white vertical tick in the scrollbar — this shows you where the Ticker is along the timeline, while the width of the scrollbar shows how much of the timeline is currently visible in the viewport.


CHANGING TIMELINE UNITS

You can click the number in the 'Ticker Position (Current Frame)' box on the top of the timeline to toggle between showing units in Seconds vs Frames.


Next: Keyboard shortcuts & Input →

Animator is a design tool for animated user interfaces — for real apps. Think of it as a design portal to your team's codebase. Use Animator to:

  • Design imaginative UI components
  • Snap them into existing codebases (Web, iOS, Android)
  • Then keep iterating on them from your design tools, hand-in-hand with developers

Whether you live inside your design tools, your text editor, or both — Animator helps your team build your product, together.

Today, our team is thrilled to launch Animator for Mac, our motion design & UI-building tool, and to open-source Haiku Core, our renderer and design-as-code component format — both in public preview.

Haiku

Demo time! From design to code and back again:

Why animation?

At its heart, Animator is a way to design and build apps. So why the motion design tooling? Because animation is table-stakes for modern apps. Animation is so ubiquitous today that to the consumer it's invisible until it's missing or abused. Yet as universal as animations are, the state-of-the-art for creating animations for software is no better than it was 25 years ago. That is: you have to code them.

Sure, there's no shortage of prototyping tools, for designers to communicate motion to developers, so they can then code the 'real thing.' Many tools will even generate code so you can give the developer a chunk of (normally difficult-to-use) code as a starting point — but make no mistake: none of today's design hand-off tools make it to the finish line. The moment a developer gets involved, e.g. to patch in live data or adapt to an existing project, the designer passes the baton and can no longer touch those pixels. Not without knowing how to write code.

This conundrum is no secret — many have concluded that the only way to prepare for the future as a UI designer is to learn how to code. At Haiku, we don't believe visual design tooling is going away, nor should the masters of those tools. Obviously code isn't going anywhere soon, either. So 18 months ago we set out to create a future where design and code are connected, where designers and developers can collaborate as easily on software as developers do with other developers.

https://coolcfiles647.weebly.com/best-free-malware-detection-software.html. And while the road ahead of us is still long, today we invite you to take Animator for a spin. While in preview, it's completely free. Even if Animator isn't a fit for your team — we firmly believe this approach is the future of designer-developer collaboration. Turbomosaic 3 0 8 – photo mosaic maker.

A foundation of design as code

The fundamental disconnect between design and code comes down simply to the different tools that we use. Though both designers and developers produce pixels on screens, they're 'different kinds' of pixels. Though both design tools and code tools store their data in files, they're different file formats. Though code has undergone monumental transformations over the last decades toward open standards, design tools are still locked away in walled gardens.

What if — a design tool were built from the ground-up on open standards? With an open file format and an open source renderer? (hint: this is Animator for Mac)

What if the design file format happened to be code? Like hackable, hand-editable code? Where design components were ready for codebases as code components? (hint: this is Haiku Core)

Haiku Animation Gif

It turns out when your design is code, you can do a lot of crazy stuff. Like live-design your app from your design tool. And keep designing your product alongside developers, from concept to final iteration. Check out the video at the beginning of this blog post for more of what I mean (the juicy developer bits start at 3:47.)

What's today? What's next?

Today, you can create animated, interactive components inside Animator, then add them to any Web app. By exporting to Lottie, you can also create animations for iOS and Android apps. Animator lets designers track their work seamlessly with Git (powered by GitLab) and then delivers versioned design components to developers through yarn/npm via the Haiku CLI.

As for tomorrow, our backlog runneth over. Some features you won't find in Animator today, but that we're excited to add as soon as we can:

  • Multi/nested components
  • Layouts
  • Baseline form controls (checkboxes, text boxes, etc.)
  • Richer animation features, like path morphing and animated masks
  • Drawing tools inside Animator, plus support for Illustrator, Photoshop, and more
  • 'Teams,' our suite of deeper team collaboration features

And a note on pricing: while in Preview, Animator is entirely free to use. Our plan is to charge for team collaboration features, but otherwise to leave Animator for Mac (and of course, the open source Haiku Core) free to use. While this is subject to change as we refine our strategy, we're sharing this now as we believe in transparency, and we respect the time investment you make when checking out a new tool like Animator.

Haiku Animation Project

If you have any questions, or if your team would like to beta-test our Team features, please reach out!

Haiku Animation Gif

We can't wait to see what you create.

DESIGNER PREVIEW

Haiku Animation Background

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Haiku Animation

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