Simple Cartoon Animation using Visual States

One of the goals of Silverlight’s Visual State Manager technology is to let you do quite a bit of control customization without needing to use Blend’s Timeline, nor even having to know what a Storyboard is! Feel free to test-drive the Silverlight Button below, and then read on for a run-down of how easily it can be built.

I started out with some vectors (Paths) depicting the face in its normal resting state. Then I used the Tools > Make Into Control command to make the artwork into a template applied to an actual Button. After deleting the ContentPresenter from the template, I selected the MouseOver state in the States pane, so that the changes I was about to make to the existing elements (to produce a face that looks alert and ready) would be recorded only in the MouseOver state. I moved the head and the features upward a little, and the rest of the changes involved using the Direct Selection tool to move Path points around.

Because I wanted the Pressed state to be a variation on the MouseOver state, I used the Tools > Copy State To command to duplicate all my changes into the Pressed State. Then, with the Pressed state selected, I adjusted one eye and the mouth to make the wink.

For the Disabled state I decided I needed new graphics instead of adjusting properties of the existing graphics. So I created a simplified grayscale version of the face and made that version opaque only in the Disabled state.

For transition timing, I created a number of transitions to and from various states and set their durations to taste.

Finally, so that each Button instance can customize some aspect of the template, I used template bindings so that Brush colors used in the template to draw various pieces of the face are bound to properties of the Button instance. So for example I selected shoulders, then selected Fill in the property inspector, and then clicked Advanced property options > Template Binding > Background. So now, by setting a value for Background, Foreground, BorderBrush and OpacityMask, a Button instance with this style set on it can determine the colors of the shoulders, face, hair, eyes and nose.

You can download the sample project files here.

Steve