v1.0.0 (April 12, 2022)

Welcome to TikTok Effect House, our new creation platform that allows you to build AR effects for TikTok!

Creative Effects are a fixture of the TikTok experience. From Versailles Run to Dancing Dino, effects make content creation easy, fun, and dynamic. The Community Effects you create here have the potential to reach TikTok’s global community and inspire new trends, lots of joy, and endless creativity.

Effect House gives you access to intuitive technologies that allow for powerful effect development and design. From advanced interactions to visual scripting, you’ll have all the tools you need to experiment and build engaging, immersive, and innovative effects.

Whether you’re an expert 3D designer or just starting out, our learning resources – from step-by-step guides to video tutorials and templates – can help you get started creating your first effect.

Let’s kick things off! Start by downloading Effect House and joining the official Effect House community on Discord, where we’ll announce updates and events, and where you’ll be able to meet fellow designers, pop in for office hours, troubleshoot questions, share feedback, and showcase your effects.

We’re so excited to welcome you to Effect House and see what you build! Below is an overview of some key features to better acquaint you on your creation journey.

Feature Highlights

• Tracking and Detection
  • AR Camera and AR Plane allow you to create effects that are supported by plane tracking.
  • Segmentation support includes portrait, hair, head, cloth, sky, ground, and buildings, and allows you to separate your assets from background textures or objects.
  • Hand Tracker allows you to track hand gestures and attach objects to hand joints.
  • Head Tracker detects the on-screen head and provides information about its 3D space.
  • Body Avatar Drive allows you to track the position and rotation of joints on one body, or partial bodies, in 3D.
• Face Effects
  • Face Stretch gives you the ability to control proportions of certain facial features using keypoints.
  • 3D Face provides a 3D mesh that fits onto a face in real-time and can be used to create interactive face effects, such as face morph effects that are triggered when a mouth opens or customized face shapes.
  • Face Sticker allows you to pin any 2D image on your face within the 2D panel.
  • Face Avatar Drive controls your 3D model with blendshapes and reflects your facial expressions.
  • Face Mask enables you to implement 2D face painting effects, such as makeup.
  • Face Inset gives you the ability to cut out selected face parts and manipulate them in the scene.
  • Eye Color enables you to configure your eye color.
• Animation
  • Animation Sequence enables you to apply 2D animated textures (JPG or PNG) to 3D objects, or use them as 2D images.
  • Skeletal animation enables you to add an animation to your effect by producing 3D models with a rig.
• Post Effects
  • Post Process effects include Chromatic Aberration, Distortion,Grain, Vignette, and more.
  • Bling allows you to add sparkles to your effect.
  • Liquify enables you to give a liquified look to videos and faces.
  • Filter allows you to apply LUTs on your camera effect to alter the colors.
• Lighting and Rendering
  • Simple Skybox material fills an empty space in the camera view with a Cubemap.
  • Built-in materials include occluder, standard PBR, unlit, matcap, and simple lighting.
  • Lighting allows you to add different light sources to your scene, and shadow allows you to cast shadows based on your light sources.
• Visual Scripting
  • We have provided many nodes that can be used in visual scripting, such as Switch, Select, Facial Detection, Hand Gesture, and Animation Sequence Controller.
  • Subgraph feature allows you to import and export collections of visual scripting nodes.
• 2D Support
  • 2D panel allows you to design 2D elements, with features such as 2D image and 2D canvas.
  • Image compression is available for 2D images. Choose between Automatic, Manual, or None.
• 3D Support
  • We currently support FBX, glTF, GLB, and OBJ file formats for 3D assets.
• Templates
  • You can use the provided templates such as Head Tracker, 3D Face Mask, Face Morph, Cloth Try On, and Hand Gesture to quickly get started with creating popular effects.
• Effect Preview
  • You can visualize and test your effect using the built-in tool preview or by clicking the “Preview in TikTok” button to generate a QR code that can be scanned in TikTok to try your effect within the app directly.
• Effect Submission and Management
  • Hints allow you to add optional interaction triggers to your effect.
  • Once ready, you can submit your effect for approval, and can track and manage all your effects in your management portal on the Effect House website.

Known Issues

• For designers updating to v1.0.0 in tool, you may encounter a missing template issue. To resolve this, please manually download the v1.0.0 version from the Effect House website.
• Bling texture size will display smaller than expected on the M1 laptop. Please preview the effect via TikTok to prevent this.
• TikTok users will need to update to the latest app version (v23.9.0) in order to view effects that use texture sequence.