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In this Flutter Video tutorial, we take a look at the Flare Flutter runtime library and the Flare UI toolkit. These two tools were released when Google officially released Flutter to the world during their 2018 I/O conference. Flare is a runtime and toolkit that allows for developers to build assets and then import them directly into Flutter (and other platforms). These assets can be manipulated much like any other widget in the Flutter Framework which makes them feel like native widgets.
Flare is a fairly comprehensive SaaS (software as a service) that can be accessed from a browser. The Toolkit gives you a robust set of tools which can be used to design and develop graphics and user interfaces features. You can build the assets using the tools and you can import existing SVG files directly into the toolkit. Flare makes use of a tree based hierarchy that works in a way that is similar to Flutter's own widget tree. Parent objects have control over their children which makes it easy to determine how the objects will interact with one another during an animation.
The above image shows off the general hierarchy of the asset that was created during this Tutorial. Everything is a child to the artboard which is the main field that you draw these components on-top of. Underneath of that we have a rectangle which is used to define a background color for our Solar System. Next to it is the Sun node which is a static node that sits in the very center of our animation. The sun node is what pins together all of the different shapes that represent our Sun in the graphic. The Sun then connects to the Earth node with a Bone and like the Sun node, the Earth node pins together the various components for our Earth.
Once you've defined a tree hierarchy for your graphic, you can then create a bunch of different animations. The animations are able to run at a smooth 60 frames per second and they can be defined directly on the asset itself and then executed with the Flare runtime in your Flutter application. You may also interface with these animations using Flutter AnimationControllers and the controls given you you by the Flare_Flutter library. This allows you to not only define premade static animations but also define the behavior of an asset based on user interaction. When you export a file from Flare, you are given a .flr file which you can then import into your flutter application like any other asset file. This .flr file can then be used to execute the predefined animations and also create dynamic behavior in combination with objects from the Flare_Flutter library.
Above is a Gif of the graphic and animation that was created for this Tutorial. This animation is running in the Android emulator inside of our Flutter application and it runs at a smooth 60 frames per second. The animation of the moon, earth and sun rotating was a predefined animation created in the Flare Toolkit. It was then imported into Flutter via a .flr file and then rendered into our application using a FlareActor object.
Above is the code used to define the FlareActor object. Notice that we need to input the .flr file's path using a string. We then are able to stretch, pan and align the asset using the fit and alignment properties built into the FlareActor Object. There are also many other properties that we can use to modify how the graphic is rendered by Flutter including coloring, decorations, rotations and transformations. At the very bottom of the FlareActor code is a string defining the animation that we want to execute when this widget is rendered by our application. We can also control how this animation executes using this property in concert with a few other properties given to use by the Flare_Flutter library.
The Source Code for this video may be found here: https://github.com/tensor-programming/flutter_flare_example
The Flare Asset made in this video can be found here: https://www.2dimensions.com/a/tensordeveloper/files/flare/solar
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