I'm curious if anyone could potentially help me conceptualize the best, and most efficient, approach to accomplish an effect wherein a a video/image sequence is overlayed on top of a view. The best example would be the stock Weather app on iOS. A screenshot;
You can check out the animation here. I've done some testing and have found that the easiest approach is to create my graphics with an alpha channel in After Effects, then export as a .png image sequence, and use the following code;
// Set the animation group
myAnimation!.animationImages = [UIImage]()
for var index = 0; index < 149; index++ {
var frameName = String(format: "image_\(index)")
myAnimation!.animationImages?.append(UIImage(named: frameName)!)
}
myAnimation?.animationDuration = 5.0
myAnimation?.startAnimating()
The issue I keep facing is that, for a five second animation loop, I'm looking at 150 frames of content. Creating these graphics at #3x and #2x resolutions, even with app thinning, is making my app bundle huge. Additionally, and more importantly, appending 150 images to the array seems to create a fair amount of lag in playing the content.
If I were to build a weather app, like the example above, I'd also be looking at dozens of different weather conditions and would need hundreds of individual frames.
Are there better ways of going about this? Thanks!
I would try using AVPlayer with an .mp4. Video with low contrast (like the weather app) will help keep the size down and the impact minimal.
An actual working and optimal solution for alpha channel videos in an iOS app can be found in this answer. Keep in mind that if you compose multiple videos over multiple backgrounds that will inflate your app since each video takes up space in the download. No way around that. Also, decoding all that PNG image data on the fly will burn a lot of CPU.
Related
I looked into inverse kinematics as a way of using animation, but overall thought I might want to proceed with using sprite texture atlases to create animation instead. The only thing is i'm concerned about size..
I wanted to ask for some help in the "overall global solution":
I will have 100 monsters. Each has 25 frames of animation for an attack, idle, and spawning animation. Thus 75 frames in total per monster.
I'd imagine I want to do 3x, 2x and 1x animations so that means even more frames (75 x 3 images per monster). Unless I do pdf vectors then it's just one size.
Is this approach just too much in terms of size? 25 frames of animation alone was 4MB on the hard disk, but i'm not sure what happens in terms of compression when you load that into the Xcode and texture atlas.
Does anyone know if this approach i'm embarking on will take up a lot of space and potentially be a poor decision long term if I want even more monsters (right now I only have a few monsters and other images and i'm already up to ~150MB when I go to the app on the phone and look at it's storage - so it's hard to tell what would happen in the long term with way more monsters but I feel like it would be prohibitively large like 4GB+).
To me, this sounds like the wrong approach, and yet everywhere I read, they encourage using sprites and atlases accordingly. What am I doing wrong? too many frames of animation? too many monsters?
Thanks!
So, you are correct that you will run into a problem. In general, the tutorials you find online simply ignore this issue of download side and memory use on device. When building a real game you will need to consider total download size and the amount of memory on the actual device when rendering multiple animations at the same time on screen. There are 3 approaches, just store everything as PNG, make use of an animation format that compresses better than PNG, or third you can encode things as H264. Each of these approaches has issues. If you would like to take a look at my solution to the memory use issue at runtime, have a peek at SpriteKitFireAnimation link at this question. If you want to roll your own approach with H264, you can get lots of compression but you will have issues with alpha channel support. The lazy thing to do is use PNGs, it will work and support alpha channel, but PNGs will bloat your app and runtime memory use is heavy.
I'm developing a app that will showcase products. One of the features of this app is that you will be able to "rotate" the product, using your finger/Pan-Gesture.
I was thinking in implementing this by taking photos of the product from different angles so when you "drag" the image, all I would have to do is switch the image according. If you drag a little, i switch only 1 image... if you drag a lot, i will switch them in cadence making it look like a movie... but i have a concerns and a probable solution:
Is this "performatic"? Since its a art/museum product showcase, the photos will be quite large in size/definition, and loading/switching when "dragged a lot" might be a problem because it would cause "flickering"... And the solution would be: instead of loading pic-by-pic i would put them all inside one massive sheet, and work through them as if they were a sprite...
Is that a good ideia? Or should I stick with the pic-by-pic rotation?
Edit 1: There`s a complicator: the user will be able to zoom in/out and to rotate the product in any axis (X, Y and Z)...
My personal opinion, I don't think this will work the way you hope or the performance and/or aesthetics will not be what you want.
1) Taking individuals shots that you then try to keyframe to based on touch events won't work well because you will have inevitable inconsistencies in 'framing' the shots such that the playback won't be smooth
2) The best way to do this, I suspect, will be to shoot it with video and shoot it with some sort of rig that allows you to keep the camera fixed while rotating the object
3) I'm pretty sure this is how most 'professional' grade product carousel type presentations work
4) Even then you will have more image frames than you need -- not sure whether you plan to embed the images files in app or download on demand -- but that is also a consideration in terms of how much downsampling you'll need to do to reduce frames/file size
Suggestion
Look at shooting these as video (somewhat like described above) and downsampling and removing excess frames using a video editor. Then you could use AVFoundation for playback and use your gestures to 'scrub' into the video frames. I worked on something like this for HTML playback at a large company and I can assure you it was done with video.
Alternatively, if video won't work for you. Your sprite sheet solution might work (consider using SpriteKit). But then keep in mind what I said about trying to keyframe one off camera shots together -- it just won't work well. Maybe a compromise would be to shoot static images but do so by fixing the camera and rotating the objects at very specific increments. That could work as well I suppose but you will need to be very careful about light and other atmospehrics. It doesn't take much variation at all to be detectable to the human eye causing the whole presentation to seem strange. Good luck.
A coder from my company did something like this before using 360 images of an object and it worked just great but it didn't have zoom. Maybe you could add zoom by adding a pinch gesture recognizer and placing the image view into a scroll view to zoom in on the static image.
This scenario sounds like what you really need is a simple 3D model loader library or write it in OpenGL yourself. But this pan and zoom behavior is really basic when you make that jump to 3D so it should be easy to find lots of examples.
All depends on your situation and time constraints :)
I have a list of png images that I want them to show one after another to show an animation. In most of my cases I use a UIImageView with animationImages and it works fine. But in a couple of cases my pngs are 1280*768 (full screen iPad) animations with 100+ frames. I see that using the UIImageView is quite slow on the emulator (too long to load for the first time) and I believe that if I put it on the device it will be even slower.
Is there any alternative that can make show an image sequence quite smoothly? Maybe Core Animation? Is there any working example I can see?
Core Animation can be used for vector/key-frame based animation - not image sequences. Loading over a hundred full-screen PNGs on an iPad is a really bad idea, you'll almost certainly get a memory warning if not outright termination.
You should be using a video to display these kind of animations. Performance will be considerably better. Is there any reason why you couldn't use a H.264 video for your animation?
Make a video of your pictures. It is the simplest and probably most reasonable approach.
If you want really good performance and full control over your animation, you can convert the pictures to pvrtc4 format and draw them as billboards (textured sprites) with OpenGL. This can be a lot of work if you don't know how to do it.
Look at the second example
http://www.modejong.com/iPhone/
Extracts from http://www.modejong.com/iPhone/
There is also the UIImageView.animationImages API, but it quickly sucks up all the system memory when using more than a couple of decent size images.
I wanted to show a full screen animation that lasts 2 seconds, at 15 FPS that is a total of 30 PNG images of size 480x320. This example implements an animation oriented view controller that simply waits to read the PNG image data for a frame until it is needed.
Instead of alllocating many megabytes, this class run in about a half a meg of memory with about a 5-10% CPU utilization on a 2nd gen iPhone. This example has also been updated to include the ability to optionally play an audio file via AVAudioPlayer as the animation is displayed.
I have a three-second PNG sequence (a logo animation) that I'd like to display right after my iOS app launches. Since this is the only animated sequence in the app, I'd prefer not to use Cocos2D.
But with UIImageView's animationImages, the app runs out of memory on iPod Touch devices.
Is there more memory-conscious/efficient way to show this animation? Perhaps a sprite sheet class that doesn't involve Cocos2D? Or something else?
If this is an animated splash screen or similar, note that the HIG frowns on such behavior (outside of fullscreen games, at least).
If you're undeterred by such arguments (or making a game), you might consider saving your animation as an MPEG-4 video and using MPMoviePlayerController to present it. With a good compressor, it should be possible to get the size and memory usage down quite a lot and still have a good quality logo animation.
I doubt you're going to find much improvement any other way -- a sprite sheet, for example, is still going to be doing the same kind of work as as sequence of PNGs. The problem is that for most animations, a lot of the pixels are untouched from frame to frame... if you're presenting it just as a series of images, you're wasting a lot of time and space on temporally duplicated pixels. This is why we have video codecs.
You could try manually loading/unloading the png images as needed. I don't know what your frame rate requirements are. Also, consider a decent-quality jpg or animated gif. And you can always make the image smaller so it doesn't take up the whole screen. Just a few thoughts.
I have 35 pictures taken from a stationary camera aimed at a lightbox in which an object is placed, rotated at 10 degrees in each picture. If I cycle through the pictures quickly, the image looks like it is rotating.
If I wished to 'rotate' the object in a browser but wanted to transmit as little data as possible for this, I thought it might be a good idea to split the picture into 36 pictures, where 1 picture is any background the images have in common, and 35 pictures minus the background, just showing the things that have changed.
Do you think this approach will work? Is there a better route? How would I achieve this in photoshop?
Hmm you'd probably have to take a separate picture of just the background, then in the remaining pictures, use Photoshop to remove the background and keep only the object. I guess if the pictures of the background have transparency in the place where the background was this could work.
How are you planning to "rotate" this? Flash? JavaScript? CSS+HTML? Is this supposed to be interactive or just a repeating movie? Do you have a sample of how this has already been done? Sounds kinda cool.
If you create a multiple frame animated GIF in Photoshop you can control the quality of the final output, including optimization that automatically converts the whole sequence to indexed color. The result is that your background, though varied, will share most of the same color space, and should be optimized such that it won't matter if it differ slightly in each frame. (Unless your backgrounds are highly varied between photos, though by your use of a light box, they shouldn't be.) Photoshop will let you control the overall output resolution, and color remapping, which will affect the final size.
Update: Adobe discontinued ImageReady in Photoshop CS3+, I am still using CS2 so I wasn't aware of this until someone pointed it out.
Unless The background is much bigger than the gif in the foreground i doubt that you would benefit greatly from using separate transparent images. Even if they are smaller in size,
Would the difference be large enough to improve the speed, taken into consideration the average speed with which pages are loaded?