I've been searching for awhile, but haven't been able to find anything. I'd like to be able to add kind of a glimmer or sparkly animation on an image element in wpf.
Essentially the effect here I'm after here is the same that you get with trading cards that are "foil's".
I'd like to have an image, and then be able to add this animation to it at will. I'm thinking maybe some kind of user control, or template possibly. Hopefully generic enough that I can just toss an image at it and it will just overlay the image and run.
Any ideas?
A simple construction that easily can be turned into a control is by nesting the image in a Grid and adding a second Grid (on top) as a sibling.
De second grid can be given a linear gradient brush that is primarily transparent but does contain a white glimmer.
This brush can be animated; you could move it and change the opacity of the grid/brush.
This way you do not change the image.
Related
I think I must be missing something obvious, but I'm unable to find this after several hours of searching. Is there no way to use a PictureBox or other control to contain an image with partial transparent/alpha-blended pixels, and place that over another image and have the blending be based on the image under it?
For example, this produces the results I want:
Place a panel on a form.
Add an OnPaint handler.
In the OnPaint handler draw 1 PNG, then draw another PNG over it, using Graphics.DrawImage for both.
This does not:
Place a PictureBox on a form and set it to a PNG.
Place another PictureBox on the form and set it to a PNG.
Place the 2nd picture box over the first.
...even if the 2nd picture box is just empty and has a background color of Transparent, it still covers the picture below it.
I've read this stems from all winform controls being windows, so by nature they aren't transparent.
...but even the 15 year old platform I'm migrating from, Borland's VCL, had several windowless controls, so it's hard to imaging winforms doesn't at least have some easy solution?
My first example above is one answer, true, but that adds a lot of work when you can only use one big panel and draw all of your "controls" inside of it. Much nicer if you can have separate controls with separate mouse events/etc. Even if not an image control, and a control I have to draw myself, that would be fine, as long as I can just put one image in each control. In VCL they called this a "paint box", just a rectangle area you could place on a form and draw whatever you want on it. Has it's own mouse events, Bounds, etc. If you don't draw anything in it, it is like it's not even there (100% transparent) other than the fact it still gets mouse events, so can be used as a "hot spot" or "target" as well.
The PictureBox control supports transparency well, just set its BackColor property to Transparent. Which will make the pixels of its Parent visible as the background.
The rub is that the designer won't let you make the 2nd picture box a child of the 1st one. All you need is a wee bit of code in the constructor to re-parent it. And give it a new Location since that is relative from the parent. Like this:
public Form1() {
InitializeComponent();
pictureBox1.Controls.Add(pictureBox2);
pictureBox2.Location = new Point(0, 0);
pictureBox2.BackColor = Color.Transparent;
}
Don't hesitate to use OnPaint() btw.
Sorry, I just found this... once I decided to Google for "winforms transparent panel" instead of the searches I was doing before, the TransPictureBox example show seems to do exactly what I need:
Transparency Problem by Overlapped PictureBox's at C#
Looks like there are 2 parts to it:
Set WS_EX_TRANSPARENT for the window style
Override the "draw background" method (or optionally could probably make the control style Opaque).
Before drawing a shape on a canvas I have a preview that displays how the shape will look. I can adjust the opacity and then draw the shape. I may then wish to draw a second shape with a different opacity. My problem is that altering the opacity of the preview also alters the opacity of the shape that I have already drawn.
This has led me to believe that I need to create a copy of the brush used for the preview each time before drawing the shape.
There are various different brushes and for example, the gradient brushes require making a copy of the not just the gradient stop collection, but a new gradient stop for each gradient stop in the to-be-copied collection.
Am I down the right track here or should I be doing something else? Should I be copying or cloning? Would an extension method be the best way to go? Thoughts please.
What you need is cloning, it would be easy in wpf with XamlWriter/Reader, unfortunately you cannot do it in Silverlight. An extension method on Brush that makes a deep copy would work fine in your case though. You will have to handle the different brush type separately but it should not be an issue as there aren't that many.
I have a requirement to morph from an image (png) to a shape (polygon) in Silverlight 3 as an effect, but of course there is no built in transition or method to do this.
At the moment the best I have is fade one out and the other in, but can anyone suggest a decent alternative that may work or look better?
Regards
Moo
In Blend:
Create a rectangle. Set stroke to No Brush and Fill to Tile Brush.
For the ImageBrush of the Tile Brush, select your image.
In the object browser, select the rectangle, right click > Path > Convert to Path.
Use the pen tool to add some points to the path.
Add a storyboard.
Add a keyframe at 1 second. Blend will go into record mode
Use the direct selection tool to move the points into the polygon shape you want. Test out your animation.
At this point, the image morphs into a shape, but the image is still there. If you need to remove the image as well as morph it:
In your storyboard, at the keyframe at 1 second, change the opacity to 0.
Create a copy of the rectangle, but make sure fill is set to No Brush and Stroke is set to a color and width. Set the opacity to 0.
Add points, and mimic the animation you just set up for the image's rectangle.
Add a keyframe at 1 second for this element. In record mode, change the opacity to 100%.
The end result will be both paths morphing, the one with the image fading out while the one with no fill fading in.
I'm not a silverlight programmer, and don't know the details of what you want to do, so this is just a shot in the dark, but... if the shape you want the image to morph to is always going to have the same initial visual appearance (or some limited set of appearances) you might try morphing from the original image to an image of that shape, and then swapping the image that's the morph target for the geometry once you're done the morph. Course whether that would work or not is very dependent on the details of what you're doing. Sorry if you've already considered that and ruled it out.
You could possibly morph the image brush to the path of the shape by using an appropriate projection matrix. Or render a shape using the image brush and then morph that shape to the target shape, i.e. go from a rectangle to the target shape but using the image brush as the shape background. You may need to still warp the image brush somehow though.
An example of rendering a warped image is here in Charles Petzold's blog.
I would like to animate a transition when moving content between two panels. I am getting a bit map image of a detail record and docking it as a thumbnail in the panel below. The docking area is in a footer grid and the content detail is in another grid that sits above the dock area (the dock and the main content area live in separate rows of the root layout control - another grid).
I have tried implementing this with a ScaleTransform and a TranslateTransform, simultaneously shrinking the image and moving it towards the footer control. When it moves into the footer control, it gets clipped even though the image Canvas.ZIndex property is set to a very high number. Eventually the thumnbail will need to be a child of a StackPanel that sits inside the footer grid.
Thanks for your consideration and help.
I had a similar problem (clipping) with a WPF animation I had. The problem was that the owner of the animation needed to be a parent of both containers for the animation to work (in my case I made it the actual window holding the containers).
Without any code, I can't see if that is your problem, but I thought I would throw it out there.
You can see my code where I animate moving from one container to another here:
http://wiassistant.codeplex.com/sourcecontrol/changeset/view/36638?projectName=WIAssistant#924851
(See the AnimatePaneBox method at the bottom of the file.) This may or may not be useful to you.
I've done something similar by creating a Canvas that sits over the top of both containers, using a WritableBitmap (if necessary) to create a rendering of the object that you're moving and attach it to that Canvas, animate the bitmap (translate, scale, opacity, whatever), and then pop the new object in under it at the end of the animation. It can be brittle if your controls need to be able to move or resize, but in most of my circumstances it's been a reliable hack.
In processing a group of items, I wanted to display a unified image of the status of the group, so I essentially made a Grid of a number of progressbars with transparent backgrounds and various colored foregrounds all at the same cell.
I'm running into some transparency artifacts (purple bar is actually purple under the green, and sometimes it draws over the top, etc) and it just seems a bit wasteful. So, I decided to make my own, but now I've got a bit of paralysis on how to do it. Do I use the DrawingContext in FrameworkElement's OnRender, or is there something simpler? Is there a set of general rules when it comes to making your own control?
I pondered switching to a pie chart since those are easy to come by, but its high time I did something not off-the-shelf.
Thanks!
I'm not quite sure how you intend the progressbar to combine different progresses, but if say the furthest along progress is at the bottom of the z-index and the least along progress is at the top, then I'd do something on the lines of this:
1) I would probably create a user control for this new progresbar.
2) It would have a property called NumberOfProgresses, that is tied with an array containing status of said progresses.
3) Each progress would be represented by a Border item (or perhaps something more suitable up the visual tree), because it's a simple wpf control with a background property. The background property would be set to nice a looking progress style and the progress color can be bound in the style to say the border's borderbrush property. Making it easy to set the color of the progress.
4) The user control would have a method UpdateProgress which takes the percentage value and the index of the progress in the array as parameters.
5) As progresses are updated you can either, just calculate the appropriate width (user control actual width * percentage) for the border and play around with the Z index to get it displayed at the top/bottom, or stack the borders horizontaly, set the least along progress as first, then for the rest of the progresses you'd have to substract previous progresses lengths to get the same effect.
This way there would be no transparency induced artifacts and no OnRender()...
Mind you, in WPF there should be no reason to mess with OnRender this and OnRender that, like it was required in WinForms with OnPaint.
Just set up the elements via code to get the look you want, and let WPF do it's rendering ;)
I can imagine one problem with this user control though. You'd have to provide feedback to the user as to which color belongs to which progress. But that would probably take you back to square one, meaning it's better/simpler to just display multiple progressbars.