I'm trying to write a fairly simple animation using Core Animation to simulate a book cover being opened. The book cover is an image, and I'm applying the animations to its layer object.
As well as animating a rotation around the y axis (The the anchorPoint property set of the left of the screen), I need to scale the right hand edge of the image up so it appears to "get closer" to the user and create the illusion of depth. Flipboard, for example, does this scaling really well.
I can't find any way of scaling an image like this, so only one edge is scaled and the image ends up nonrectangular.
All help appreciated with this one!
CoreAnimation, by default, "flattens" its 3D hierarchy into a 2D world at z=0. This causes perspective and the like to not work properly. You need to host your layer in a CATransformLayer, which will render its sublayers as a true 3D layer hierarchy.
Related
I've known that there are 4 types of transition effect: horizon, vertical, flip, curve.
But, what I want is the transition effect used in Podcast application.
It's similar with the flip effect, but it's slightly different. As you can see the picture below, it looks like it has volume; so it's more spectacular.
How can I make a transition effect like this?
The animation is probably done with three separate views - the outgoing, the side, and the incoming. The anchor point of each view's layer can be set such that they all rotate around the same central vertical axis, which is half of the side's width inset into the screen. The side view is initially rotated to M_PI_2, the back view to M_PI.
All three layers can then be rotated by M_PI. This will give the appearance of a rotating solid object. The main view's sublayer transform should be adjusted to give some perspective to the rotation. This involves setting the .m34 value to a small number, there are plenty of examples of this around on the web.
*all angles in radians, some may need to be negative, this is just an explanation of the principles
I've created a canvas within which I display an image that is clipped when it goes over the edges. I can do this fine with a square shaped frame, however the frame I want to use is the one below. Is there any way I can clip the image inside the frame without having to add a non transparent square border around the image, i.e. just using the black line that I've already drawn? (on iPad)
You'll need to use Core Graphics and Quartz to handle this sort of clipping/graphics manipulation.
http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/GraphicsImaging/Conceptual/drawingwithquartz2d/Introduction/Introduction.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP30001066
If you're using UIBezierPath, you may be able to achieve the clipping you're after using the following process
http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/GraphicsImaging/Conceptual/drawingwithquartz2d/dq_paths/dq_paths.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP30001066-CH211-TPXREF101
Convert your UIBezierPath to a CGPath
Get your image into a CGContext
Add your CGPath to the context via CGContextAddPath
Clip your context using CGContextClip
Alternatively, if you don't want to be messing with paths (and depending on whether this technique is suitable for your situation, your description of the issue makes it hard to tell), it might be worth using image masking to achieve the effect you're after. See the first link and look under "Bitmap Images and Image Masks".
I have been looking for the solution on the web for a long time. Most tutorials are fairly simple about adding shadow to a UIView. I also noticed that if we add a shadow to an UIImageView. The shadow shape could perfectly fit the shape of the content image if the image itself has alpha channel in it. Say for example, if the image is an animal with transparent background, the shadow shape is also the same as that animal (not a rectangle shadow as same as UIImageView frame).
But these are not enough. What I need to do is to add some changes to the shadow so it may have some rotation angle and compressed (squeezed or shift) effect so that looks like the sunlight comes from a certain spot.
To demonstrate what I need, I upload 2 images below, which I captured from the Google Map App created by Apple. You can imagine the Annotation Pin is an image which has the Pin shape, so the shadow is also "pin shaped", but it is not simply "offset" with a CGSize, you can see the top of the shadow is shifted right about 35 degrees and slightly squeezed the height.
When we tap and hold and pin, the shadow is also animated away from the pin, so I believe that such shadow can be made programmably.
The best shadow tutorial I can found so far is http://nachbaur.com/blog/fun-shadow-effects-using-custom-calayer-shadowpaths But unfortunately, that cannot make this effect.
If anyone know the answer or know any better words to search for, please let me know. Thank you.
(Please note that the shape of the image is dynamic in the App, so using any tool like Photoshop to pre-render the shadow is not an option.)
In order to create dynamic effects like this, you have to use Core Graphics. It's incredibly powerful once you know how to use it. Basically you need to set a skew transform on the context, set up a shadow and draw the image. You will probably have to use transparency layers as well.
It doesn't sound like you can use CALayer shadows, since that is meant to solve a specific use-case. The approach Apple takes with the pin marks on the map is to have two separate images that are created ahead of time (e.g. in Photoshop) and they position them within the map relative to a reference point.
If you really do need to do this at run-time, it should still be possible by using either Core Graphics or ImageKit. To get a blurred shadow appearance, you can use the kCICategoryBlur CIFilter. You can then convert the image to grayscale. And to get that compressed look you just need to resize and skew the image.
Once you have two separate images, you can either take the CGImageRef for the shadow image and can set that as the content of another sublayer, or you can add it as a separate view.
If you know what all the shapes are, you could just render a shadow image in Photoshop or something.
I've got my layer hosted workspace working so that using CATiledLayers for hundreds of images works nicely when the workspace is zoomed out substantially. All the images use lower resolution representations, and my application is much more responsive when panning and zooming large numbers of images.
However, within my application I also provide the user the ability to resize layers with a resize handle. Before I converted image layers to use CATiledLayers I was doing layer resizes by manipulating the bounds of the image layer according to the resize delta (mouse drag), and it worked well. But now with CATiledLayers in place, this is causing CATiledLayers to get confused when I mix resizing of layers through bounds manipulation and zooming/unzooming the workspace through scale transforms.
Specifically, if I resize a CATiledLayer to half the width/height size (1/4 the area), the image inside it will suddenly scale to a further 1/2 the resized frame leaving 3/4 of the frame empty. This seems to be exactly when the inner CATiledLayer logic gets invoked to provide a lower resolution image representation. It works fine if I don't touch the resize handler and just zoom/unzoom the workspace.
Is there a way to make zooming/resizing play nice together with CATiledLayers, or am I going to have to convert my layer resize logic to use scale transforms instead of bounds manipulations?
I ended up solving this by converting my layer resize logic to use scale transforms by overriding the setBounds: method for my custom image layer class to scale it's containing CATiledLayer, and repositioning accordingly. Also it is important to make sure the CATiledLayer's autoresizingMask is set to kCALayerNotSizable since we are handling resizes manually in setBounds:.
Note: be sure to call the superclass's implementation of setBounds:.
I do not really understand the way I'm suppose to render a side-scroller? How do I know what to render when my character move? What kind of positionning should I use for the characters?
I hope my question is clear
The easiest way i've found to do it is have a characterX and characterY variable [integer or float, whatever you want] Then have a cameraX and cameraY variable. Every object in the scene is drawn at theObjectX-cameraX, theObjectY-cameraY...
CameraX/CameraY are tweened by a similar-to-midpoint formula so eventually they'll reach playerx/playery[Cx = (Cx*99+Px)/100] ... yeah
By doing this, every object moves in the stage's space, and is transformed only on render [saving you from headaches]
Use a matrix to define a camera reference frame.
Use space partitioning to split up your level into screens/windows.
Think of your player sprite as any other entity, like enemies and interactive objects.
Now what you want is the abstraction of a camera. You can define a camera as a 3x3 matrix with this layout:
[rotX_X, rotY_X, 0]
[rotX_Y, rotY_Y, 0]
[transX, transY, 1]
The 2x2 sub-matrix in the top-left corner is a rotation matrix. transX and transY defines the translation part, i.e the origin. You also get scaling for free. Just simply scale the rotation part with a scalar, and you have yourself a zoom.
For this to work properly with rotation, your sprites need to be polygons/primitives, say like triangles or quads; you can't just apply the matrix to the positions of the sprites when drawing. If you don't need rotation, just transforming the center point will work fine.
If you want the camera to follow the player, use the player's position as the camera origin. That is the translation vector [transX, transY]
So how do you apply the matrix to entity positions and model vertices? You do a vector-matrix multiplication.
v' = vM^-1, where v' is the new vector, v is the old vector, and M^-1 is the matrix inverse. A camera needs to be an inverse transform because it defines a local coordinate system. An analogy could be: If you are in front of me and I turn left from my reference frame, I am turning your right. This applies to all affine and linear transformations, like scaling, rotation and translation.
Split up your level into sub-parts so you can cull objects and scenery which does not need to be rendered. Your viewport is of a certain size/resolution. Only render scenery and entities which intersect with your viewport. Instead of checking each and every entity against the viewport bounds, assign each entity to a certain sub-screen and test the bounds of the sub-screen against the viewport and camera bounds. If your divide your levels into parts which are the same size as your viewport, then the maximum number of screens visible
at any particular time is:
2 if your camera only scrolls left and right.
4 if your camera scrolls left, right, up and down.
4 if your camera scrolls in any direction, and additionally can be rotated.
A screen-change is an event you can use to activate entities belonging to that screen. That could be enemies, background animations, doors or whatever you like.
If this is your first foray into writing a side-scroller, I'd suggest considering using an already existing game engine (like Construct or Gamemaker or XNA or whatever fits your experience level) so you don't have to worry about what order to render things and how to make it all work. Mess with that a bit--probably exploring a few of them--to get a feel for how they do things then venture out to your own once you've gotten used to it.
Not that there's anything wrong with baptism by fire but it can get pretty overwhelming in my opinion.