Book Image

Instant Silverlight 5 Animation

By : Nick Polyak
Book Image

Instant Silverlight 5 Animation

By: Nick Polyak

Overview of this book

Silverlight is a Web technology that allows you to create both large business applications and little ads for your web page. Silverlight's main advantage is the ability to create rich UIs easily. In this book we will show how to build animations for different types of Silverlight applications in order to create great user experience."Instant Silverlight 5 Animation" is a practical guide to creating great user experiences in Silverlight. This book will clear Silverlight/WPF concepts needed for creating animations as well as practical examples of creating animations that will help you become an efficient developer for creating animations with Silverlight.This book provides a number of hands on examples of creating Silverlight animations in order to improve the user experience whether you are building a Silverlight Business application or a Silverlight banner ad. We also talk about ways to integrate Silverlight animations with business logic quickly and in the least invasive way. This book can be of help to both beginners and advanced developers. It starts talking about Silverlight concepts like dependency/attached properties and bindings. Then it goes into nitty-gritty detail of creating different animations for different application types. We explain how to animate custom controls, page navigation, how to imitate animation of random processes like fire or moving clouds. We talk about creating 3-D animations and building banner ads for your web page. Every concept, we describe in this book, is supported by small, detailed and easy to understand samples.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

Background on Perlin noise


Here we provide a background on Perlin noise and explain the Perlin noise algorithm in detail.

A bit of history

Perlin noise is probably the most popular algorithm for generating random textures. Perlin noise was invented in 1985 by Ken Perlin, a professor at NYU and among other things was used for creating animations for several movies including Oscar winning Tron and many others. Here is the URL to a talk by Ken Perlin, detailing what has been achieved using Perlin noise: http://www.noisemachine.com/talk1/index.html.

The big advantage of using Perlin noise is that even though it is random, the pixels next to each other are still correlated – just the way they are in natural textures.

Perlin noise algorithm

Noise is a function that maps any point in a one, two, three, or more dimensional space into a real number. Usually we are only interested in noise that cannot grow infinitely high or low, so without the loss of generality we can assume that our noise maps a point...