How can I create animations?
- How to create animations
- How to use elementary transformations
GLUT makes it fairly easy to write applications with a moving scene and /or camera. You can declare a function which is called by GLUT whenever there is no message to handle. You can be sure, that it is called often enough to get smooth animations, i.e. more than about 25 times per second. This function is passed with glutIdleFunc(). What you have to do is to modify some values (for example change the position of an object) and then repaint the scene, what is normally done by a call to your "Display"-method.
How can I use elementary transformations? Imagine you have a big 3d-object, perhaps a human-being or an animal. It could consist of thousands of vertices. If you now want to rotate this object or move it, it would be quite inefficient to apply this operation to each vertex. As a game or graphics programmer you should always care for rendering speed, even if you are sure that your application will run smoothly. You always have to remember, that there are people with slower machines and it is easier to add new effects later, if the speed is better. So now, how can we solve this problem? This is absolutely easy: A vertex is first multiplied with the modelview matrix and then with the projection matrix. The modelview matrix is used to apply operations like moving (also called translating), rotating and scaling. Each of those can be expressed by a matrix. After multiplying this matrix with the modelview matrix, every vertex passed to OpenGL is moved, rotated or whatever. If you don't know how to get such a matrix: Never mind. You don't have to compute it yourself. There are three OpenGL functions which do the work – not only this, they also use hardware acceleration if available. So never write your own matrix multiplying functions if there are already some!The commands are glScale*, glTranslate* and glRotate*, where * must be replaced by f (float), i (int) or d (double). glScale* and glTranslate* take three arguments: One for each dimension. glRotate* takes an angle (in degrees) and a rotation axis. This is (nearly) all you need to apply transformations.
But there is something you have to know if you want to apply several transformations: The order of transformations is very important and must be understood: The rotation axis always goes through the origin, that means you always turn around the origin. So it is logically, that translating an object and then rotating it gives another result than rotating an then translating. Ok, this is pretty easy. But because you (or at least OpenGL) uses matrices you have to swap the order of transformation! Or – if you think in a local coordinate system – the order in which transformations are applied is correct. Try some transformations to learn how they work! (Also see "Translations Part2", another tutorial about this topic.)
If you have more than one object, you probably have to apply different transformations for each object. To use glLoadIdentity is quite slow – and if you use a camera (see my camera tutorial) it even doesn't work. But OpenGL helps: It has a matrix stack for each matrix (you can push at least 32 matrices to the modelview matrix stack). This is done by glPushMatrix(). After pushing it to the stack, you can apply transformations, draw an object and then restore the matrix again, what is done by glPopMatrix().
To work with those transformations, you should use glutWireCube(). The only parameter it takes is the size. Note: You could call glScale before, then you wouldn't get a cube!
Click here to see the result of transformations, using glutIdleFunc and the matrix stack.
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