Let's say you have some flutter widget, for example, a TabBar. It is rendered in a rectangular box. I need it to be rendered in an arc so that the text and the underline follow part of a circle (or better still, a bezier curve).
How can that be achieved?
This illustrates what I am trying to achieve - bent TabBar widget:
Please note that in this case, the TabBar bends following and an arc (edge of a circle). This is what I need immediately. However, in the future, I might need bending that follows the edge of an eclipse so a solution that allows it would be preferable.
Also, a solution that works for different widgets is preferred.
IMPORTANT: I do NOT want to clip a curved shape of the widget. The entire area of the widget should stay visible. Instead, I need to bend the content of the widget (=bend its render image).
Apologies for the bold font but without it, people will keep posting answers about how to clip a widget which is trivial in comparison and useless for my problem.
An answer "this is currently not supported by Flutter" from authority (e.g. high reputation in Flutter tag or Flutter a team member) will also be accepted.
One approach: Use a CustomPaint to draw lines/areas/etc freely
You can use a CustomPaint to draw whatever curved lines, areas, etc freely. Therefore, you can definitely achieve your goal - since they are nothing but curved lines, areas with curved edges, rotated texts, etc.
That will take a bit of work, but if you encapsulate it well enough, it is not that hard to implement. For example, draw a Path with filled red area, then draw a white arc, then draw several texts with calculated rotations, etc. Sounds like you can do that within maybe hundreds of lines. If you find difficulty implementing this please comment and I will explain.
Another approach: Hack Canvas such that the call to drawLine becomes indeed calls to drawPath, etc.
You may do the following to allow bend/crook for any widget (and their combination, of course), but this may need a bit of engineering. You can make your own Canvas, say, class BendCanvas implements Canvas {}. The BendCanvas.drawLine, for example, has an implementation of Canvas.drawPath with a curved path cooresponding to the input "line". Similar things hold for drawing rectangles, etc. Then you need to hack Flutter's painting logic, such that it takes in your own BendCanvas instead of the original canvas. This is a universal solution, and it is much more efficient (less code) if you plan to have a lot of bend UI; but if only on bend TabBar, maybe use the first approach.
As for the bend text
In the two approaches above, we have mainly described how you draw the bended rectangle (i.e. draw an arbitrary shaped widget). As for bending text, see: https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/16477 , which is still an open issue.
Remarks
It is not possible using transformations. As explained in the comments, you already see Transform does not work - it is affine or perspective, which, by definition, will not bend. Then what about other transforms? After some research there seems to be none. Then, what about looking under the scene. We know Flutter uses Skia under it to draw the UI with high performance, then let us search through Skia. However, it does not provide any transformations like bending. So there seems no use.
P.S. I am not that high reputation in Flutter tag, but I did answer >100 Flutter questions (including some dig-into-source-code style ones), and have developed >100k lines of Flutter code in the production app.
Related
I'm new to Unity and to game development in general.
I would like to make a text-based game.
I'm looking to reproduce the behavior of an instant messenger like messenger or whatapp.
I made the choice to use the Unity UI system for the pre-made components like the rect scroll.
But this choice led me to the following problem:
I have "bubbles" of dialogs, which must be able to grow in width as well as in height with the size of the text. Fig.1
I immediately tried to use VectorGraphics to import .svg with the idea to move runtime the points of my curves of Beziers.
But I did not find how to access these points and edit them runtime.
I then found the "Sprite shapes" but they are not part of the "UI",
so if I went with such a solution, I would have to reimplement
scroll, buttons etc...
I thought of cutting my speech bubble in 7 parts Fig.2 and scaling it according to the text size. But I have the feeling that this is very heavy for not much.
Finally I wonder if a hybrid solution would not be the best, use the
UI for scrolling, get transforms and inject them into Shape sprites
(outside the Canvas).
If it is possible to do 1. and then I would be very grateful for an example.
If not 2. 3. 4. seem feasible, I would like to have your opinion on the most relevant of the 3.
Thanks in advance.
There is a simpler and quite elegant solution to your problem that uses nothing but the sprite itself (or rather the design of the sprite).
Take a look at 9-slicing Sprites from the official unity documentation.
With the Sprite Editor you can create borders around the "core" of your speech bubble. Since these speech bubbles are usually colored in a single color and contain nothing else, the ImageType: Sliced would be the perfect solution for what you have in mind. I've created a small Example Sprite to explain in more detail how to approach this:
The sprite itself is 512 pixels wide and 512 pixels high. Each of the cubes missing from the edges is 8x8 pixels, so the top, bottom, and left borders are 3x8=24 pixels deep. The right side has an extra 16 pixels of space to represent a small "tail" on the bubble (bottom right corner). So, we have 4 borders: top=24, bottom=24, left=24 and right=40 pixels. After importing such a sprite, we just have to set its MeshType to FullRect, click Apply and set the 4 borders using the Sprite Editor (don't forget to Apply them too). The last thing to do is to use the sprite in an Image Component on the Canvas and set the ImageType of this Component to Sliced. Now you can scale/warp the Image as much as you like - the border will always keep its original size without deforming. And since your bubble has a solid "core", the Sliced option will stretch this core unnoticed.
Edit: When scaling the Image you must use its Width and Height instead of the (1,1,1)-based Scale, because the Scale might still distort your Image. Also, here is another screenshot showing the results in different sizes.
I know there are game/sprite engines written for Flutter, but my goal is to better understand painting and widgets, so I want to do this myself.
If I wanted a bunch of small widgets that could move around on a gameboard, what would be the best way to do this? Would I just create a box widget with fixed dimensions and have a bunch of children where I could control their position?
One example would be having a playing area with scrabble tiles that could be moved around. Or Tetris blocks falling. Different widgets that can be anywhere and that can be moved. I'm just looking for someone to point me in the right direction. Thanks.
You can draw custom shapes and lines using canvas in flutter and then animate them as flutter supports 60 frames per second. You need to understand customPaint very well. Here is a great demonstration of how to use customPaint to draw custom shapes.
https://medium.com/#rjstech/flutter-custom-paint-tutorial-build-a-radial-progress-6f80483494df
I'm looking for an efficient way to draw curved lines and to make an object follow them in Unity.
I also need to draw them using a custom image and not a solid color.
And on top of that I would like to apply an outer glow to them, and not to the rest of the scene.
I don't ask for a copy/paste solution for each of these elements, I list them all to give some context.
I did something similar in a web app using the html5 canvas to draw text progressively. Here a gif showing you the render:
I only used small lines to draw what you see above. Here a very big letter with thinker lines so lines are more visible:
Of course it's not perfect, but the goal was to keep it simple and efficient. And spaces on the outer edges are not very visible in normal size.
This is used in an educational game working on mobile as a progressive app. In real world usage I attach a particles emitter to it for better effect :
And it runs smoothly even on low end devices.
I don't want to recreate this exact effect on Unity but the core functionality is very close.
Because of how I did it the first time, I thought about creating a big list of segments to draw manually, but unity may have better tools to create this kind of stuff, maybe working directly with bezier curves.
I a beginner in Unity so I don't really know what is the most efficient way to do it.
I looked at the line renderer which seemed (at first) to be a good choice but I'm a little bit worried about performances with a list of 500+ points (considering mobiles are a target).
Also, the glow I would like to add may impact on the technique to choose.
Do you have any advice or direction to give me?
Thank you very much.
I wonder is there any way to slice this sprite(dialog pop up thing) that could keep the bottom center (the upside-down triangle) not scaled? I'm using nGUI if it matters.
Nope
Sorry, but that's how 9-slice scaling works. You would need 25 slice scaling to do what you're looking for and that's overkill for most things, so I've never seen an implementation.
What to do instead...
Break up your sprite into two pieces: the 9-slice portion and the "notch" portion. Then just position the notch to be in the right place.
I haven't used nGUI (only iGUI and the Unity native--both old and new) so I'm not sure on the precise nature of how nGUI will let you do that, but you'd still need two sprites, one of which is scaled and the other one which isn't, positioned either manually or through parent-child relative relationship. If your dialog is always the same width, it'll be pretty straight forward. If not, it might be more challenging.
A few other things:
You'll probably want the notch sprite and the bubble sprite to the same native image size, but its not necessary (might make things easier, might not).
The notch will want to have some "overbleed" so that when the two stack the underlying rendering code doesn't go all squinty eyed and go "there's a gap here..." and draw through in some cases.
Depending on the bubble portion's drawn edge, you might want the notch to be in front or behind. In your precise case, I don't think it'll make a difference. It's a little hard to tell due to the colors, but when I did a selectable tab (which is built similarly), the tab sits on top of the container window so that the shaded edge flows nicely. The unselected version then has no overbleed so it looks like it sits "behind" (accurate pixel placement--2D game at a fixed size--insures that no "gap" is rendered).
It's a little tedious but pretty straightforward to implement this for UI images. I recently did it in order to make a slice stretch the left/right borders of a 9-slice instead of the center.
The trick is to subclass Image and override OnPopulateMesh, where you do the calculations you need and set positions/uvs to whatever you require.
Here's a helpful how-to article: https://www.hallgrimgames.com/blog/2018/11/25/custom-unity-ui-meshes
Things for a non-UI sprite will be harder. I think you'll have to create all your geometry in a script, and the calculations might be a little complicated because you're using an atlas.
I'm investigating the feasibility of using Raphael for a user-research project. One of the features allows for users to drag images onto a canvas and we record where they placed it. The pool of images is potentially quite large and we'll have them in a scrollable box in the tool.
I put together a quick wireframe of the issue I'm looking into since it'll probably be clearer than my explanation.
Please see the wireframe:
I'd stick with straight HTML/CSS and use jQueryUI draggables, as you mention in your comment.
You don't appear to need any of the drawing/display features SVG offers, yet if you went that route, you'd have to build your own custom scrolling behavior (instead of setting a CSS overflow-y rule) and picture layout algorithms (again instead of using CSS floats or something).
You can create a scrollable region using Raphael.
Create the viewport with fixed
dimensions (say 800x600)
Draw the images with increasing y value. After few images, the y value will go beyond 600. It will be drawn but will not be visible in the viewport.
Create a scrollbar using raphael rects. Attach drag events to the scrollbar handle rect.
When the handle is moved, translate all the images accordingly.
For e.g. lets assume in step 2, you had drawn all the images and the bottom most point of the end image is having y value 2000. Assuming the scrollbar has length 500, each dx movement of the handle will have to translate 2000/500 = 4dx. You can calculate the handle length similarly using ratios.
Since everything inside a single Raphael paper the dragging of images will work seamlessly. You will have to maintain the positions of each images.
You might find this demo similar
Remember you can always use getBBox when you drop. In this case it's rects but images would be the same..
http://irunmywebsite.com/raphael/additionalhelp.php?q=bearbones