Howto make animation from movie sequence?

Solar2D General Questions/Discussion
#1

I have a customer who wants me to develop a little animated app.
Certain touch gestures should lead to specific animations on screen. The problem: The animations are short movie sequences.
Of course the animations shouldn’t be played back in a movie player window, but more like a “virtual pet” kind of animation…

do you guys have any hints for me how I can achieve that if the source material is a little movie sequence?

Thanks in advance for any hints. [import]uid: 11219 topic_id: 7603 reply_id: 307603[/import]

#2

At a high level, you would probably want to use either the “movie clip” library, or the sprite sheet library.

Movie clip info:
http://blog.anscamobile.com/2010/06/improved-movieclip-library/

Sprite sheet info:
http://developer.anscamobile.com/reference/sprite-sheets

Sprite sheets make better use of memory than movie clips, so if the sequences contain lots (say, > 30-40 images) I would use sprite sheets.

Tim

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#3

Hey Tim and thanks for your reply!

So you say I could do the following:

  • Convert a short video sequence to single frames / extract the frame images from the sequence

  • Put them into a sprite with 50 - 100 images for example, which has full screen size of the IPhone

  • Play this sprite sheet as soon as the user touches the screen in a certain way

—> the user gets the impression of an animated person on screen for example. Kind of like a “virtual pet” animation with a real person.

?
I thought sprite sheets where limited regarding the number of images they contain, that’s why I thought sprite sheets wouldn’t work that well.

I also thought about playing back the actual movie sequence with “showControls” set to “hidden” in the video playback call from Corona

media.playVideo(“sample_mpeg4.mp4”, false, onComplete)

…but don’t know whether that would work that well or the bug is still around that the video controls don’t disappear.
What do you think about that method in comparison?
Thanks for your help!

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