PETZOLD BOOK BLOG
Charles Petzold on writing books, reading books, and exercising the internal UTM
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Text Morphing but with Decomposed Outlines
November 13, 2009
New York, N.Y.
I'm not quite sure how to describe this Silverlight program. It contains two text strings of approximately equal linegth for which I've generated flattened PathGeometry objects using a WPF program I've described in a previous blog entry. The character outlines of each text string thus consist of a series of tiny lines. By animating these little lines back and forth between the two outlines, the text strings seem to morph into each other, but in a rather unusual way.
Through a little finagling, the program equalizes the number of lines that comprise the outlines of each text string. There are 832 lines, and hence 1664 PointAnimation objects going at once. (I've used a BackEase easing function so the animation overshoots the mark and then returns for another interesting effect.) Despite the large number of animations, it seems to run remarkably smoothly — at least on my machine. Here's the source code.
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Comments:
That's really very cool.
— Jeff Yates, Fri, 13 Nov 2009 08:55:24 -0500
I am 3D modeling student and want to know if Silverlight can be used inside Maya or 3D studio max?
— Rahul, Mon, 16 Nov 2009 00:42:23 -0500
I think the smaller lines look much better than the larger lines.
I reakon it'd look really cool if you generated a whole bunch of single point that make up the outline of each of the text shapes (that when put together look the same as the normal text) or at least 1 unit long lines so they look like points. I reakon that would look like an explosion >:)
— MF, Mon, 16 Nov 2009 04:36:34 -0500
WOW!!! keep them coming!!
— Anthony Tarlano, Mon, 16 Nov 2009 06:00:08 -0500
Hey Rahul, Silverlight is a web browser plugin (for FireFox, IE, Safari on Mac ...). I don't think it can run inside Maya or 3D studio Max, and it wouldn't make sense, those apps have their own animation plugin ecosystem.
You can export 3D models from Maya and 3DMax into WPF, not sure about Silverlight, tho.
— Sherif Tariq, Thu, 19 Nov 2009 10:39:15 -0500
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