The magic of animation

Creating a decent animation, albeit a lot of fun, is quite complex. Besides being able to create the content (and therefore exhibiting basic artistic skills) one has to go through the mundane process of trying to figure out what exactly should be on every frame.

SVG, as a format, is absolutely atrocious at expressing animations. KDE 4 is moving more towards dynamic metaphors, where animations will be used to convey a lot more information. Now the question is how do we let people who inherently have no artistic skills create animations that look and behave correctly. While "look correctly" is pretty simply defined as: it's visually appealing. Then "behave correctly" has a more complex definition that will depend on many factors. We'll define a "well behaved animation" as one which simply doesn't irritate or inhibit the work flow of the users.

While the latter is mostly a challenge for usability engineers I'd like to help people create animations - quickly, with minimal amount of artistic skills and no mundane tasks. So ideally I'd like to be able to say "this is what I'm starting with" and "this is what I'd like to end up with" and see computer animate this process. The technique is known under "shape interpolation", "shape blending", "image morphing" and many other names. There was a lot of research done on this topic but so far no one used this technique to do real-time animations on desktop.

The most popular research papers related to this problem include "As-Rigid-As-Possible Shape Interpolation", "A physically based approach to 2-D shape blending" and finally "As-Rigid-As-Possible Shape Manipulation". If you haven't seen it, you definitely want to look at the last one, there's a short movie on that site showcasing some of the things one can do utilising their algorithm. Some of the examples from the above research follows:

I think that shape interpolation together with as-rigid-as-possible shape manipulation done on QPainterPath's, or whole SVG's in fact, could potentially be the answer to our animation woes. The pain, once again, is that people always work on polygons in those papers so I'd need to spend a bit of time to figure out how to mix it in with paths and inject curves into the algorithm.

Oh, and yesterday was the "World Hug Day" so if you haven't hugged anyone yet, go right ahead.