Animation....

[ngill]

Okay, I was just wondering... in the Redbook, it says that if you wanna do some animation you should do it like at a steady rate... 60fps, 30fps, 20fps, 15, 12 etc... what about in this scenario...

there is a big object in the center... all I want to do is go around in a circle looking at it...

instead of WAITING until the time for a frame runs up... why not just map the time onto an angle and make the "camera" at cos x, sin x, looking at the object??

The latter seems better to me than what they have in the redbook... what do you think?

[El Jefe]

Having a constant frame rate is nice in terms of providing smooth animation, but that rarely happens even in a perfect world.

I think a better solution is kind of like what you've described. You do object translation/rotation interpolated by the current frame time. If you do it properly, you can have a varying frame rate and it still will look pretty smooth. Of course if the frame rate flutters too much, it can still end up looking like crap, but...this solution works pretty well in real world situations.