Animator-Library for Processing

Animator-Library

About

The animator library is a library to make time based anmations in processing. Animator objects can be used to animate values over a timespan using a animation function currently supported are Linear-, Square-, or Squareroot-Animators.

Download

animator.zip

animator-002-src.zip

Installation

To install the library download the zipfile, and unzip it in the library folder of your sketchbook-folder

Documentation

An animator interpolates a value starting from a startvalue to a stopvalue over a given timespan

A linear animator can be defined like this

Animator a = new LinearAnimator( time, startvalue, stopvalue );

where time is a long value defining the time in ms

startvalue and stopvalue are floats.

to start the animation

a.start();

is called

the current value of the animator can be fetched using

float v = a.get();

This can be used for example to move an object from a start to an endpoint, change it's color, size, rotation etc

Currently 3 types of animator are implemented

LinearAnimator - interpolates the value using a linear function
SquareAnimator - interpolates the value using a square function
RootAnimator - interpolates the value using a squareroot function

A 4th class that implements the Animator interface is the Delay object which simply pauses for the given amount of time and always returns the same value this is only usefull in combination with Sequences.

Animators can also be added to a Sequence object

Sequence s = new Sequence();
s.addAnimator( new LinearAnimator( 500,100,200 ));
s.addAnimator( new SquareAnimator( 200, 200, 100 ));

the sequence can be started using s.start() and the value is fetched using s.get()

A simpler form of defining sequences is to use the string-parser

the same Sequence as above can be defined using

Sequence s = Sequence.parse( "S100,L500->200,Q200->100");

The animators are separated with a comma, each block starts with a letter and one or two parameter

"S" is the start value
"L" defines a LinearAnimator the first integer defines the time the second one the target value
"Q" defines a SquareAnimator the first integer defines the time the second one the target value
"R" defines a RootAnimator the first integer defines the time the second one the target value
"D" defines a Delay in milliseconds

Examples

some simple examples that moves some ellipses from left to right is included in the library and should show up in the examples menu after installing the library.