M3G Chapter 2.   An Animated Model

[ This chapter does not appear in the book. ]

This chapter is about the animation of a penguin model so it moves in a circle around the origin on the XZ plane. The images on the right shows two screenshots of the penguin at different points in its journey.

Two animations are applied to the penguin: a translation to move the model around the circumference of a circle, and a rotation so the penguin stays pointing in its current direction of motion. The animations are implemented using M3G's AnimationTrack, KeyframeSequence, and AnimationController classes.

Other features of this application:

• we utilize M3G's retained mode, which means that the world is built using a scene graph;
• the floor is a textured square, implemented in its own Floor class;
• the display mixes 3D rendering and MIDP's drawString(), which adds the penguin's current coordinates to the top-left of the screen;
• the penguin model is represented by a Mesh object, constructed using coordinate data generated by the ObjView application described in the previous chapter. Model creation is wrapped up inside an AnimModel class;
• the scene uses a single directional light source, a light blue background, and a fixed camera. We also explain how to employ an image as a background.

The code is available in the AnimM3G/ subdirectory.

My thanks to Kari Pulli, Tomi Aarnio, and Kari J. Kangas of Nokia for helping me to understand animation using keyframe sequences.

Downloads

• The PDF file for M3G Chapter 2 (369 KB). Last updated: 26th October 2004.
  
• Zipped Source code for M3G Chapter 2 (94KB). Last updated: 26th October 2004.
  
• List of the updates to the chapter (1KB). Last updated: 26th October 2004.
  
  

• Up to the Killer Game Programming in Java Index Page
• Back to M3G Chapter 1. Loading OBJ Models into M3G
• On to M3G Chapter 3. Mighty Morphin' Penguin Flippers

Dr. Andrew Davison
E-mail: ad@coe.psu.ac.th
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