Designers and developers can finally bid farewell to the fear of being dominated by "screen adaptation"! Rive has recently released a new feature called Layouts, which allows users to create dynamic and responsive animated graphics. These graphics can automatically adapt to different devices and screen sizes while maintaining Rive's signature interactivity and smooth animation effects.
What exactly is Layouts? Simply put, it's like a "universal layout tool" that allows your animations to automatically adapt to various screen sizes while maintaining Rive's consistent smoothness!
With Layouts, designers can easily create layouts that automatically adapt to screen sizes, such as buttons, lists, or menus, which display perfectly on both mobile phones and computers. Designers can freely choose which elements follow layout rules and which can be displayed independently.
Additionally, animations can be added to layout elements to make the interface more vivid and flexible. For example, a graphic can be designed to adjust its size based on position, dimensions, padding, and margins to fit all devices. When using Layouts, graphics can stretch and realign according to screen size without losing animation effects.
One of the highlights of Layouts is cross-device compatibility. Graphics can transition smoothly between car dashboards and smartphones, maintaining consistent visual effects. Designers only need to create the graphic once, and it will automatically adjust on all platforms without the need to create separate versions for each platform.
Layouts also support multiple languages, automatically adjusting layout sizes based on language length. For example, when the text length is longer, Layouts can rearrange or resize text boxes to fit different language display requirements. This ensures consistent display effects for all languages, and developers do not need to worry about typesetting issues that may be caused by different languages.
For designers who need to create complex layouts, Layouts offers options for deep nesting and flexible layouts. Designers can use alignment, wrapping, and spacing options to create complex UI layouts, such as multi-level UI elements, or complex structures that need to be adjusted on different screens.
Layouts also support the Breakpoints feature, which can trigger Rive's state machine based on component width, height, or proportion changes, executing different animations or layout changes. For example, when the screen switches from landscape to portrait, Layouts can automatically switch to another layout or animation state.
Unlike other design tools, Rive Layouts allow designers to freely choose whether objects participate in the layout engine and can break layout rules at any time for free design. This means designers can embed highly animated characters and other free elements into more structured layouts to achieve flexible design effects. Even when adjusting layouts, the animations of the characters can remain smooth without being restricted by the layout engine.
Additionally, Layouts support integration with Rive's Constraints system, allowing designs to break away from traditional hierarchical relationships. Even if the UI layout changes, animations can maintain their original positions and shapes precisely and controllably, ensuring the stability of visual effects. For example, when the page layout changes, the constraint system will automatically adjust the relevant elements to avoid layout confusion.
Components in Layouts can be controlled through Rive's state machine, triggering different state changes based on the component's width, height, or proportion. This allows designers to add interactive animations to the layout, such as triggering different animation sequences or response effects based on the device screen. Rive's state machine also allows control over every detail of the animation during layout adjustments, enabling designers to mix multiple responsive and interactive animations in one design, providing users with a richer visual experience.