The animation series that was published on this blog last week has been largely the product of reworking the animation layer in Substance look-and-feel and replacing it with the Trident animation library. This work has some implications for the users of both library, and today i’m going to talk about those.

If you’re using Substance look-and-feel library in your applications, you will need to add the matching Trident jar to your classpath – starting from release 6.0 of Substance. The matching Trident version is 1.2 and it will be officially released at the same time with Substance 6.0. While this is not a major Trident release, it does remove deprecated APIs and as such will break applications that are using those APIs. All the removed APIs have direct replacements, and the final release notes will provide additional information (if you cannot find it in the code). The final Trident 1.2 / Substance 6.0 releases are scheduled for March-April 2010 timeframe.

Substance 6.0 breaks API signatures of most published painter interfaces. The painter interfaces that received two color schemes and the cycle position now only receive a single color scheme. If you are just using Substance as the application look-and-feel, you should not need to worry. If you are using Substance painter APIs to create consistent visuals for your custom / 3rd party components, you will need to change the code. If you have passed the same color scheme to a painter API call, changing your code is simple. If you passed two different color schemes, you will need to call the Substance API twice, changing the graphics composite to match the value of the cycle position.

Breaking the painter APIs is a necessary step to enable multi-state color transitions discussed at length in this series. The old APIs assumed that animating a control always involves two states – previous and current. This assumption is not correct. Suppose your buttons are painted with light blue color. When the mouse is over a button, the button is painted with light yellow color, and when the button is pressed, it is painted with saturated orange. Substance animates the button colors based on the state transitions. Suppose it takes 500ms to complete a single animation. The user moves the mouse over a button, and Substance starts animating the color from light blue to light yellow. Halfway through the animation (250ms), the user presses the button. Now, there are three states participating in the animation: default with light blue, rollover with light yellow and pressed with saturated orange. All the states contribute to the overall appearance of the button as long as the combined animation is in progress.

Tracking state transitions is done internally in Substance – in a layer built on top of Trident base timeline APIs. The tracking layer is not going to be part of Trident 1.2, since it is closely tied not only to Swing classes, but to Substance skinning model. Applications interested in adopting multi-state transitions should not use the internal state tracker layer of Substance. It is subject to change at any point in time. The base rules for multi-state transitions are derived from the examples in this series that have shown different movement paths of a physical object between three points.

The current implementation of the multi-state transitions in Substance 6.0dev does not model most of the physical laws discussed in this series. Handling momentum / inertia, direction change involving smooth turns, and the matching velocity models are not implemented. The work on this will continue throughout 2010, and some of it might find its way to the Trident itself. I am not aware of any other animation library (Java based or otherwise) that provides out-of-the-box support even for simple animations based on the physical rules discussed in this series.

Substance animations deal exclusively with colors. The current straight-line / straight-turn / no-momentum movement paths in the RGB color space result in visually consistent and smooth animations, for any reasonable durations. However, the long term goal for both Trident and Substance is to create mathematically correct animation model which is based on the rules of the physical world – where applicable. At the present moment the mathematics behind the graphs in this series is left as an exercise to the readers.