Entity Agnostic Animation Tool for Mixed 2D 3D Scenes
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current graphics rendering and animation infrastructures require key frame-based animations, limiting their flexibility and interoperability across different graphical entities and platforms, making it difficult to visualize, create, and manipulate asynchronous or synchronous animation actions in mixed 2D and 3D scenes.
Innovation Solution
The development of entity-agnostic animation tools that decouple animation logic from specific entities, allowing animations to be defined in terms of movements without key frames, enabling seamless reuse and modification across various graphical entities and platforms, with a user interface for visualizing and editing animation sequences and groups.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Adaptability or versatility
If key frame-based animations are used in traditional graphics rendering infrastructures, then animation timing and control are simplified, but flexibility and interoperability across different graphical entities and platforms are limited
Solution Approach 1:
The animation is segmented into separate temporal tracks, each representing a distinct animation action that can be independently defined, manipulated, and applied to different graphical entities. This segmentation allows the same animation logic to be reused across multiple entities without key frame coupling.
Solution Approach 2:
The animation infrastructure is designed to be universal by decoupling animation definitions from specific graphical entities. Animation actions are defined in a entity-agnostic manner, allowing the same animation to be applied to sprites, buttons, boxes, or any other graphical object across different platforms and rendering infrastructures.
2Ease of operation
If key frame-based animations are used, then animation timing is easily controlled, but visualization and manipulation of asynchronous animation actions become difficult
Solution Approach 1:
The animation editor introduces a temporal dimension by displaying animation actions as tracks arranged along a time axis. This visual representation allows programmers to easily see the timing, duration, and overlap of multiple animation actions, making it simple to create and edit asynchronous animations without extensive programming.
3Productivity
If traditional rendering loops process each frame before rendering, then rendering efficiency is maintained, but dynamic modification and sharing of animations across platforms is limited
Solution Approach 1:
The animation definition is extracted from the frame processing loop and represented as independent temporal tracks that can be dynamically modified, shared, and applied without reprocessing entire frames. This extraction allows animations to be defined once and reused across different rendering infrastructures and platforms.
4Ease of manufacture
If animations are explicitly tied to particular graphical entities, then animation-specific logic is simplified, but reuse and interoperability across different entities are hindered
Solution Approach 1:
The animation system achieves universality by defining animations in terms of generic transformation actions (position, scale, rotation) that are applicable to any graphical entity. The temporal track system stores these actions in a entity-agnostic format, allowing the same animation to be applied to sprites, buttons, boxes, or any other graphical object without modification.
Data Source
AI summary
This disclosure relates generally to the field of image processing and, more particularly, to various techniques and animation tools for allowing 2D and 3D graphics rendering and animation infrastructures to be able to dynamically render customized animations—without the need for the customized animations to be explicitly tied to any particular graphical entity. These so-called entity agnostic animations may then be integrated into “mixed” graphical scenes (i.e., scenes with both two-dimensional and three-dimensional components), where they may be: applied to any suitable graphical entity; visualized in real-time by the programmer; edited dynamically by the programmer; and shared across various computing platforms and environments that support the entity agnostic animation tools described herein. The entity agnostic animations created by the techniques described herein may be output directly to the current scene file that a programmer is working on, or they may be output to standalone, reusable entity agnostic animation object files.