Today I saw a facial expression controller made in Toonboom and it came to my mind that it is also used in Moho (with vectors) and I just discovered that it can also be made in After Effects.
It's what they call Master controller rig
Would it be possible to do it also in Hype? I'm aware that with programming it could be done a lot, but could it be done without programming?
I don't know if you could associate the movement of any line to control a character's blinking or change the expression of his mouth. Or if this is only possible with software that uses bones.
I give the examples:
After Effects:
Moho:
I know that Hype focuses more on web animation, but the example of AE is a good example of how it could be used on commercial websites, even when answering a survey with dynamic facial expressions, something much more attractive than voting by numbers.
I was experimenting with on screen controls that hide when published. Would love to explore it more and have hype extendible with arbitrary properties with callbacks using the regular timelines in the future. There is as always an export script hack, thought.
This is a approach with „out of the box“ or with „built in possibilities“.
I definitely see the power in this approach and have an idea on the path forward that would work in Hype. That said, I've always personally found these specific ways rigs are formed to be clunkier than necessary and I'd probably like to experiment more with alternate UIs for indirect control as well .
Adding to what @jonathan had noted one thing Hype already has and is in my opinion vastly underrated: you can use symbols as "actors" and the timelines in the symbols as scripts/behaviors/routines. Then you can use the Main Timeline of your scene as a storyboard with directions by triggering them using symbol actions.
My intuition that something was possible was awakened when I saw the Mockups Simulator of @michelangelo. I quickly thought of the example @h_classen gave of the animated emoticon, although I couldn't remember where I had seen it.
Maybe working with symbols as controllers, placing them outside the scene so that they don't appear on screen, could work. I still don't know if I'm talking nonsense, I'm just throwing out ideas.
(I was struck by how the whole element moves from the movement of the group box)
This is exactly what I do for Grids that I import. The grid is a symbol that has all of the guildes I want (going beyond the hype grid tools), and then I have an animation that hides them when launched, that is, On Scene Load.
I wanted this for a few years ... I have already suggested that opening a javascript scripting for ui and animation can create several projects ... For example, Unity 3d already exists and did thousands of scripting ... It's incredible. <
I did something similar but it is not within hype.
As suggested in this proposal: If Hype fixed relative timelines in symbolAction they would act like morph targets with live preview. TimelineActions already allow morph targets using relative timelines but can only be seen after previewing.
The main problem is that we can't communicate from the WebKit view with Hype, there is no API (yet). Meaning, no ability to use the API or trigger/preview timelines with extensions. Although, you can use a mutation observer to hook up one moving element to another. That becomes a bit tricky as transformations use Matrix math, but you can parse the transform string with something along these lines…
var transforms = {}, m;
var re = /(\w+)\(([^)]*)\)/g;
while (m = re.exec(element.style.transform)) {
transforms[m[1]] = m[2];
}
console.log(transforms)
This is a great software and highly open for tweaking and property linking in the IDE. It was pushed by the people behind School of Motion. It doesn't do HTML exports, though.