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Lee's Lessons
Interpolators! Part 1
2000-05-25
Oh No! This is a lot for one day! Its been another one of those days when
I'm fighting with the code! Grrr! Too many exclamation points! Anyway,
I read a BUNCH yesterday on Interpolators and Animation and thought it
was way too thin yesterday to just leave it alone and go onto RMI so I've
decided to continue my look into Interpolators. You can think of this
topic as Behaviors->Interpolators and specifically the 5 main
Interpolators which are Scale, Position, Transparency, Color, and Rotation.
We got a brief look at RotationInterpolator yesterday and it hasn't changed
much today because today is just an overview of the main Interpolators.
I'll go into each one in more depth tomorrow. I thought this was going to be
rather trivial but even getting the most basic of Interpolators up for
Transparency and Color has proven to be quite a daunting task. In summary,
today is a brief rundown on the 5 main Interpolators.
Considering all the new Interpolators I'm writing I include them in a new
package:
package com.gamespawn.lab.mikelee.j3d.examples.interpolators;
The code may not be documented the best and the variables may be off. I'm
under a time constraint today and had a lot of problems with this so please
bear with some of the ugly code. This should not be a habit. There was just
a lot of stuff to cover today and a lot of problems.
I.e.:
// Color3f green = new Color3f(0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f);
// Color3f white = new Color3f(1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f);
// app.setMaterial(new Material(white, green, white, green, 1.0f));
This example is because of the Transparency and Color junk! When I get those
working I will fix all these here also.
I just thought of something. I wonder if you can share these behaviors
between TransformGroups or visual objects. That should cut down massively on
CPU time so I'll have to look into this.
RotationInterpolator
Pretty much the same as yesterday. The key line of code is the same as
yesterday:
RotationInterpolator rotation = new RotationInterpolator(rotationTime, objTrans);
This is the most basic constructor that rotates the passed transform group,
objTrans, around the Y axis for a given time of rotationTime.
PositionInterpolator
This moves the appropriate objects around. Pretty simple. Performs a translation
basically. The important code here is:
PositionInterpolator position = new PositionInterpolator(time, objTrans);
This is the most basic constructor also. It just moves the transform group objects
positively along the X axis. It takes time to move the transform group from
its initial spot to its final spot.
ScaleInterpolator
This, like the others, pretty much does what it says! It interpolates between
differing scales. Anyone who has ever taken a 3D graphics class understands that
this finishes out, pretty much, the 3 main geometry manipulations.
These are scaling, translation, and rotation. You can use these 3 together for
some pretty impressive results I'm sure. I will try these together one day. That
is beyond the scope of today's lesson. The important code for the ScaleInterpolator
is:
ScaleInterpolator scale = new ScaleInterpolator(time, objTrans);
Constructor looks familiar eh? It does the same thing. It Scales the objects in
the passed transform group, objTrans, from 0.1f to 1.0f.
ColorInterpolator and TransparencyInterpolator
I'm going to have to continue this tommorrow. I'm having a helluva time trying
to get even the most basic of these to work! I'm thinking the problem must be the
same between them.
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