Swapping layers/nodes programmatically

[stx]

Hi there,

Thanks for your work on this wonderful project. We have a use case I'm not sure if we can implement. If we can, great! If not, this is certainly my feature request.

Think of a character that can wear different hats. We have a Flare actor, with a set of animations, with one layer group/node (the hat) that we want to switch out as needed (with different hats). So we want to do the animations once, with one hat, but be able to swap them later.

Digging through all of the methods exposed, I smell that this might be possible with the artboard. Any insights you can share?

[luigi-rosso]

We're working on some experimental new features that will allow embedding an artboard from one file into another. It's not going to be available for a bit as there are quite a few edge cases, but we've already made good progress on it!

The feature evolved from an early prototype we tested: https://twitter.com/luigirosso/status/1112561442715099136

This is doing most of the work in Flutter code by using a custom version of the Actor (representation of a Flare file at runtime) and Artboard (representation of an artboard within an Actor). We're working on a generalized solution that is more elegant with actual sortable layers.

In the meantime I could share the code for that example if you'd find it useful? It has some shortcomings and oddities which I wanted to call out in a blog post but never got around to it!

[stx]

Yeah, the Twitter clip is basically exactly what I’m looking for. Would love to see the code for that. Thank you!

[luigi-rosso]

I wanted to do a blog article/writeup explaining what's going on a little before making it public, but because I haven't been able to find the time...here it is!
https://github.com/2d-inc/flutter_dummy_with_hat

Important stuff here:
https://github.com/2d-inc/flutter_dummy_with_hat/blob/master/lib/mountable_actor.dart
https://github.com/2d-inc/flutter_dummy_with_hat/blob/master/lib/mounted_gear.dart

[stx]

@luigi-rosso Thanks for that. I was able to mess with your example and get it working in our case but forgot to respond.

This is super neat. Definitely could use some polish on the interface for it but there's something powerful here.

[luigi-rosso]

Awesome, glad you were able to figure it out!

Glad you find it powerful. We have some ideas for how to get the process working smoothly directly in Flare. We're not quite ready to share anything about it yet, but it's already in the works!