So, here is a more in depth video about this carpet mesh builder GUI. It’s one of those things that are impossible to do in AE but reasonable to do in code (well, ok…), so I thought it might be a nice test scenario to build the framework around.
The GUI for creating this animation touches on a lot of things that are vital to building a standalone UI framework, for example some of the not so easy gesture interactions, a way to save information, it needs proper aliasing (fake, in this case), shader handling, transparency sorting, normal creation, touch handling and a bunch of other things that a UI framework can’t do without (well, normal creation maybe it could do without or the transparency sorting).
The final animations are not of a quality I would put in an app. You would need to make the timing better and you would also need to have some non-fake anitalising for the 3D edges, which is actuallly mostly trivial but beside the point here.
So the GUI basically allows you to trace a picture and place a kind of hose-shaped mesh around it with bones in-between the segments that will later be used to drive the animation. You can save everything to an XML format and you can subdivide and smooth the mesh.
There are two basic modes in which the final mesh can then be used. You can animate the rotation of the bones and then it will curl up. But you can also animate the scale of the bones and then it will look more like a brush painting-in the paths (there are better ways to make this latter animation, though). And then there is the time when I misplaced the bones and it just randomly looked like cloth flying away. So I also included that in the video.
