We have a Silverlight 2 project (game) that will require a lot of character animation. Can anyone suggest a good way to do this. Currently we plan to build the art in Illustrator, imported to Silverlight via Mike Snow's plug-in as this matches the skills our artists have.
Is key framing the animations our only option here? And if it is, what's the best way to do it? Hundreds of individual png's or is there some way in Silverlight to draw just a portion of a larger image?
You can use the Clip property on the image itself or on a container for the image to display a specific piece of a larger image, like a sprite sheet. This may or may not be more performant than swapping pngs. Also you could use the ImageBrush on a Rectangle to show just what you want, this would probably be a bit more efficient than the Clip property.
I just posted some code using Bill's suggestion regarding the Rectange and ImageBrush.
Silverlight at this time does not support bitmap effects nor has any libraries to manipulate the images. Your option now is to use keyframe animations from one png to another.
Now you can get at the raw bytes of an image. If you have your own image processing libraries you can compile them with the Silverlight dlls and then use the library in your Silverlight app.
Related
I am Working on a WPF based project where the design team have created the design in blend with some images like Edit, delete, checkbox etc. where i am prefring to use xaml insteed of images
Although i am sure that if the images are prety complex they should be used as images. but the simple im icon images can be used as xaml path designs. So i am looking for the recomandations. When to use Images in WPF design and When to use xaml for design.
If your application is going to be used in different screen resolutions then using Vector Graphics is recommended as they will scale nicely and all your images will look sharp regardless of the resolution of the screen. (There is a downside as well because your application needs to do the extra rendering of the xaml images to display them)
If you are using the images just to display the toolbar images (which are pretty much small and fixed size then you can get away by using png files as they will take less resources and easy to manage)
We have a few icons in our WPF application. We want to do an animation, pretty much like a small beacon of light going around the edges of the animation, just endlessly going around it, and following the silhouette of the icons. We found a way to do it by manually creating a path around the icons and have the beacon follow that path (which matches the silhouette), but it's too much manual work because we have a lot of different shaped icons. We're wondering if there's a way for WPF to do this automatically, so we just have to program it once, and then using on the rest of the icons.
Any suggestion very welcome.
Thanks.
Edit
Something like this.
Gee. Isn't that overkill to use wpf animation capabilities for that? Can't you just create a bunch of small animations in Photoshop or using something else and just put them in?
Like animated .GIFs. the only problem would be that: if I'm remembering it right, WPF have problems with animating .GIFs as embedded resources. So you have to load them from the disk. Or you can have them as embedded resources, but you have to extract them temporarily to the disk and then load them into your app's window.
If you are using .NET 3.5 SP1 or greater and you are requiring a code solution instead of the animated GIFs, my suggestion would be a Pixel Shader. You would need to write your own Pixel Shader that does the following:
Detect the edges. http://www.codeproject.com/KB/openGL/EdgeDetection.aspx
Takes an input parameter that can be animated with a storyboard that indicates the position of the beacon. http://www.codeproject.com/KB/dialog/WpfParentWindowShader.aspx
Highlights the edge that is indicated by the beacon position parameter and returns the original color for all other points in the image.
If you haven't worked with Pixel Shaders I would recommend downloading the Shazzam Tool, http://shazzam-tool.com/. It includes an interactive development environment to create and test your shader on simple images and also includes a decent number of Pixel Shaders with source code to help you learn about them.
I need to be able to render a silverlight storyboard animation to video. The animated content itself could be simple UIElements, Images or even two or more videos playing at the same time.
Several ideas came to mind like RenderTargetBitmap on a single frame basis, but:
1) I've never tested this against video embedded content
2) Don't know how to actually compose the video from the generated images.
Expression Encoder was also on my mind, but I don't know if it's possible to integrate it in a Silverlight/XBAP app to fulfill what's expected from it.
What's your opinion on this?
Your best bet if you just need to capture this sort of thing would be to use the Expression Encoder 4's screen recording feature, or a tool like TechSmith Camtasia.
I have a lot of images taken from a 360 camera which I would like to be able to display in Silverlight 3. They are NOT regular panorama images. The camera which took the image actually creates a distorted jpeg that becomes undistorted once wrapped around a sphere as a texture. I have desktop software that will allow viewing of the image (not just side-to-side, but straight up, down, etc.) and I need to try to get the same functionality in Silverlight. It is very similar to Google StreetView.
What I think I need is to create a sphere, wrap the jpeg on the sphere as a texture, then put the "camera" inside the sphere. I doubt this is possible in Silverlight, but perhaps there is a way to simulate this?
So far, Google searches aren't bringing anything up. Can anyone point me in the right direction to figure out how to do this? Are there any existing projects that do this?
An example of a typical image is here.
These might help you out (probably not). They are 3d engines for silverlight, but they will probably wrap the image outside of the sphere instead of inside, which is probably what you need.
Kit3D http://www.codeplex.com/Kit3D
Balder http://www.codeplex.com/Balder
Another, possibly more promising option, would be to use javascript. So far you've probably researched how to do this in Silverlight, but you might do some similar searching for using javascript for this. There may be an option out there already, and since Silverlight can interopt with Javascript, you might be in luck.
Your gonna have to map the texture to a sphere then, like you said. But afaik silverlight 3 doesn't support hardware accelerated 3d.
So your options are:
Try and find a silverlight software 3d library (Like this)
Write your own software rasterizer (multi page guide)
Hope this helps
You might want to try cropping a window from the image and display it. if the user want to go right, move the window right and crop. if the user wants to go left, move the window left and crop. to zoom out, expand the window, to zoom in make the window smaller. if you move the frame far right then stitch the image data from the left side.
You might need to modify the image to eliminate the distortion, this shouldn't be too hard and depends on the camera lens focal length.
Don't try mapping the image to a sphere, it is much harder.
At https://hdviewsl.codeplex.com it says that HD View SL (Silverlight version) supports
"orthographic (2D), with wrapping for 360-degree panoramas"
Also you could try to port PtViewer source code to Silverlight from Java if no one else has
UPDATE:
VRLight might be the solution in your case:
http://vrlight.thecloudsite.net/
http://vrlight.thecloudsite.net/tutorial.html
http://ivrpa.org/blog/3651/vrlight_vredit_20
Its author (Jurgen Eidt) is also making cPicture (http://cpicture.thecloudsite.net/index.en.html), if you can't find him from the VRLight site, try from the cPicture one, or try from his blog at IVRPA website (http://ivrpa.org/blog/3651), which seems to have recent posts
I'm planning to make an animation with Silverlight, i want to export the animation to a video format, to be able to share it on video sharing website.
How can i do this ?
You could use a tool like Camtasia to record your screen or part of your screen. It then can be exported to a bunch of different video formats.
A pure code approach is to write a sequence of images, and then combine those images together as a video file. Eric Gunnerson has code to capture images from an animation , its WPF but would probably work in Silverlight? Codeproject has an example of converting a stream of images to an AVI video file in C#. It creates an AVI output. It would be great to go straight to mpg, but as it's compressed the input needs to be a video stream. If you do need mpg as the final output look for an off the shelf avi->mpg converter.
BTW - Let me know how you get on, I'm interested in the performance/functionality of this solution.
MrTelly: That approach would not work because Silverlight does not expose the RenderTargetBitmap class. (Well, this is not completely true, the class is there, but its constructor and methods are all marked SecurityCritical and as such are not normally accessible.)
The Camtasia solution proposed by Jakers is likely the simplest solution.
It's nuts that there isn't a simple way to do this in Silverlight, it's easy as pie in flash.