Seeking advice on my approach for animating an image - relatively new to Processing

patricklmead

I am animating an image of a knife, which contains the knife plus extraneous detail. I want to display a "scene" similar to a switchblade opening. I am able to selectively display portions of the image very crudely.

Naturally, I want my animation to look very realistic. Is it better to draw the knife using curves or geometric primitives and add texture mapping or is it better to just manipulate the image that I have?

Thank you

dimkir

To me it's not clear what kind of image you have. If I try to guess from your decription, it seems that you have a "static" image (as opposed to sequence of frames showing animation on which the knife is actually opening). If you just have a static photo of a knife, then I don't think neither with processing neither with any other tool in the world you can make out of photo very realistic animation.

You have to specify in more detail: what materials (imagery) you do have, and what kind of result you are expecting (maybe you can show us similar animation you've seen on the internet). Because it seems we have different understanding of word "realistic", which for me means "animation as realistic as to be indistinguishable from real world video footage". Whereas you seem to mean something different.

Then we can give you clues of whether and how it may be accomplishable with Processing. In your current formulation, your question is unanswerable.

patricklmead

Thank you for the reply, dimkir.

Here is a link to the static knife image. My notion of realistic tends towards that which is indistinguishable from real world video footage. However, I was only asked to create a more realistic version of this mobile application, Assassin's Creed Hidden Blade App, so I think that more realistic is probably acceptable.

I know how to associate sounds with user events: tilting the phone, clicking, etc., but I wasn't sure about which approach to use for creating the graphics. I considered capturing a video and rendering a sequence of frames, primitives with texture mapping, curves with texture mapping, and image manipulation. FYI, I don't have access to a dagger such as this at this time.

I am an experienced Java developer but I am new to creative programming so I wanted to reach out to SMEs before starting my first, and admittedly unimpressive, creative application.

koogs

i'd cut the image into two, the handle and the blade (include everything up to the pivot in this blade part)

now you can draw two elements, texture mapped quads probably. do the blade first, rotated around the pivot as necessary, then the handle.

(i'm assuming the knife swings open from the side rather than straight in and out. my experience with flickknives is limited)

patricklmead

i'd cut the image into two, the handle and the blade

I'll give that a try. Thank you.