Datasheet

You can also let the user take control of an animation by creating buttons that animate objects in

various ways. Maybe you want the user to control a 3D model of a product, such as a new car, so

he can see it from all sides — even underneath. Or how about a submarine, as shown in Figure

1.4? Pressing any button causes the submarine to rotate in 3D space to its new position. It’s inter-

esting to note that the animation can kick in from whatever the current position of the object is.

This is called handoff animation and is one of the many new features of WPF that Blend supports.

The timelines that Blend uses, shown in Figure 1.4, not only support extensive animation capabili-

ties, but also sophisticated control of video and audio playback as well.

For more about animation in Blend, see Chapters 14 and 15.

FIGURE 1.4

Creating an animation in the Blend interface to control the position of the 3D submarine.

Including 3D models and animation

In Blend, you can make any image into a 3D plane that you can then animate. And you can

change that image to a video, creating an animated video on a 3D plane, as shown in Figure 1.1.

Or, you can import 3D objects from other programs. And with Zam 3D from Electric Rain

(

www.erain.com) you can import both the 3D object and its animation into Blend, because Zam

3D exports in XAML, the user-interface markup language the Expression family of programs

understands.

CROSS-REF

Designing Next-Generation User Experiences

Part I

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