George Moo

Hi Jack, thanks for replying so quickly. Upgrading to GSAP fixed my issue! What's weird is that I thought I was using the latest gsap already. I'm a Business Green member, after all, but indeed I was using the old TimelineMax from a folder deep in my project! What an idiot. But please, to those of us who started out with Macromedia Flash and still consider animating with JS a new thing, please don't call our tools "a relic from the distant past" - we feel old enough already! ? But for future reference, with the advent of offscreencanvas, web workers are no longer just for off-screen computations. We can now render to canvases in separate memory threads and free up the main thread: https://threejs.org/examples/webgl_worker_offscreencanvas.html. I guarantee you'll be hearing a lot more about it from hereon... Thanks again, George

Hi all, I have a quick, simple question (I think!) : can I use gsap inside a web worker? I've tried importing it, but I get an error in my console which says Uncaught ReferenceError: document is not defined. Which is not surprising, since the worker can't see the DOM. A brief overview of what I'm trying to accomplish: I have a complex ThreeJS scene which includes a 3D character. I use TimelineMax to create animated timelines to sync the character's lips with audio files of the character's speech. The audio files come from a text-to-speech API so they are different every time. The system I've developed works perfectly because the API I'm using gives me an XML file of the mouth visemes and timings along with the audio. So I simply manipulate my character's mouth morph shapes with a TimelineMax. In fact I have a virtual object called "face" and it has properties pertaining to the available morph shapes, so it's something like face = { smile: 0, grin: 0, sad: 0, AA: 0, EE: 0, EH: 0, ER: 0, F: 0, IH: 0 etc. etc. } and I simply animate these properties of face between 0 and 1 and on my requestAnimationFrame update I manipulate the 3D mesh accordingly, so I don't manipulate and DOM elements at all. This has worked perfectly for some time. Now, however, I'm looking at moving my 3D scene to an offscreencanvas to speed up its rendering but also to prevent the main page becoming janky whilst the assets are loading. Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I might continue to use TimelineMax please? I don't need the full functionality of gsap. Any pointers much appreciated, thank you :o)