How can an artist animate UI?

[EthanKennerly]

For example, in Defold, how can an artist animate a panel of text sliding down and fading in to show a message.

I collaborate with artists who are familiar with animating user interface buttons, texts, images, and panels in a visual editor such as Adobe Animate and Unity Editor.

In the Defold manual I read how to animate with Spine, flipbook, and code, but not how an artist can move GUI nodes around that might contain panels, text, buttons, and other conventional user interface elements.

Animation in Defold manual

I didn’t find this question on Defold. The closest I saw was:

GUI - How to make an animated window template (SOLVED)

I have created a gui that acts as a ‘popup’ or a window and, as a whole, I would like to move from a position offscreen and have it slide on screen. An example of this would be in Blossom Blast Saga when selecting a level and the window slides in from offscreen with some buttons and graphics on it. I have tried to place the gui under a gameobject within the scene, and place it offscreen when the scene starts, and then call a script that will then animate the gameobject into place on the visible…

[britzl]

Defold has no built in concept of popups, screens and other high level UI components and does thereby not support an out of the box a way for an artist to define the way one screen transitions to the next, how a popup should appear/disappear or the kind of effect that should be used when a button is pressed.

I believe that there are ways to help artists animate things in Defold in an easy way. You could expose certain kinds of properties for say animation timings as go.property() values accessible from the properties panel, or you could leverage spine to animate certain parts of a UI, or create a way to read exported animation data from say Adobe Animate. That paired with the “no-setup anyone can build and run the project” functionality of Defold should be enough allow artists to be effective in Defold as well. @sven also started working on a timeline based animation thing for Defold. I believe he posted about it here on the forum a while back.