Introduction

vvvv offers different approaches to animate objects in interactiveenvironments.

In many cases, it's not enough to just place static keyframes on a timeline and let the playhead do the job. The animation may need to react to actions or events coming from sensors, networks, input devices or beat-detectors. So in these cases the direction of movement needs to change spontaneously and you often want the transition to the new movement to occur as smoothly as possible. Time- and frame-based approaches can do this trick.

Still, often you also want to timeline some behavior and even combine the different techniques.

So here are the three basic approaches:

• Time-based Animation
• Frame-based Animation
• Timeline

Time-based vs. frame-based approaches:

Time-based:

• most time-based filters are parameterized in a way that they animate towards a target point within a specified certain time. The target can be changed at any point in time.
• the animation's speed is independent of the framerate.

Frame-based:

• typically you think about events and reaction to those events at the current moment, not so much about reaching a target in the future.
• the main idea is to change the value each frame just a bit
• the animation's speed depends on the framerate and extra care should be taken to avoid it.

Interested in particle systems?

• Particles