Direct Animation Gallery

I have included some of the best demos and some of the simplest and most elegant examples. Please right click and view source where appropriate. Some of the code is packaged as opaque executables or java, but most of it is jscript embedded in webpages which I preffer for demo purposes.

Initialy I have mined the DXMedia SDK for the demos the DA team created. As time provides I will add more of my own demos and demos contributed by DA users. Please email me with suggestions and examples(I do preffer jscript or vbscript examples).

• Fancy Demonstrations of DirectAnimation Concepts:
  • Greg Schechter, DA lead, really understood the capabilities of DA andcreated some of the best technical demos:
    • Fifteen Puzzle which really should be called 9 puzzle(?) wonderfully demonstrates how flexible the hierarchical media model is where the rendered 2D puzzle may be mapped onto a 3D object and still work (notice that the picking continues to work when 3D!). Or where a 3D animation may be reused as a texture, too. Greg repeats this theme in XXX. the onto the puzzle.
  • These demos show how a little bit of media and a bit of Direct Animation parametric transformation over time can lead to a rich experience:
    • Tile Is comprised of a single image which is animated using tiling and the rich geometric description of geometry and composited ove a simple bounded rectangle with a time varying gradient. The html containing the jscript code is 5KB and the image used is 8K.
    • Coffee was written initialy by one of our summer students. This vbscript implementation imports a small number of very small image files then tiles, scales and animates them over time for a rich experience.
    • logodots demonstrates how simple DirectAnimation can easily exceed the performance of a motion gif. Here 3 dots trace out a pattern over a standard jpg (which is actualy a part of the html file. The dot's pattern takes a relatively long time to repeat and could easily be made more random so it never repeats. In addition the animation is smooth rendered at 10's of frames a second using very little CPU time. An animated gif version would be much lower resolution spacialy (smaller in size), and temporaly (many fewer frames persecond), the animation itself would have to quickly loop after a small number of frames and the resulting gif would still be rather large taking far more time to download and start. In addition this demo is interactive (click on it) which a motion gif could never be.
    • Dancing Trapziods This is a demo Steve Judkins and I cobled together in tribute to the infamous screen saver David Tristram created for the IRIS GL while he was at NASA before joining SGI. Direct Animation lends itself to describing these kinds of behaviors. It would be fun adding the rich controls to our behaviors which David created for the GL original. View source this vbscript example and tweak the parameters or integrate scrollbars to dynamicaly control the parametric behaviors like the orginal dt program.
• Simple Examples
  • Text examples
    • helloworld demonstrates how to render text to an image and overlay it onto another image. It would be very simple to make any of the parameters time varying and in effect be animated.
  • Image examples
    • rotating image demonstrates how an image may be imported then trivialy rotated with respect to time. This demo is using the Rotate2RateDegrees transform which simplifies mapping time to a rotational transformation but hides some of the ellegance of the original DA design.
  • Geometry examples
  • Sound examples
  • Interaction examples
  • Language Integration examples
    • clock demonstrates integration between vbscript and da. The time is provided by vbscript and used to construct the DA.
  • Web Integration examples
    • pick3 demonstrates an interactive DA animation in run in a windowless control on top of live html (resize the window to watch the text reflow) casting shadows on the text... Click on the geometry to interact with the animation.
  • geometry demonstrates how to trivialy animate geometry in Direct Animation. Only 10 lines ofDA code is required. Unfortunately geometry primatives were removed from DA despite my objections so this example requires a tiny .x geometry file to be imported yet the DA code and .x file represent a tiny download.
  • colorswitch demonstrates how to attatch buttons to events to control the color of a Direct Animation object via the modifiable behavior.

Some folk have DirectAnimation examples online (remember to view source them!)
• PCProgramming