Visualplane 1.0

Visualplane is a library written in C++ that allows to create 2D animations using an easy-to-use interface. The output can be displayed and/or saved as a video. It is written from scratch using OpenGL, GLFW (for the window), FFmpeg (for the video) and the Freetype (for fonts).

example_3_min.mp4

This is an old project I wrote a few years ago in the span of two to three weeks total.

Features

• Rendering various Shapes, Text, Paths, Images
• Extensive color system including color gradients
• TexturedColor: Allowing for arbitrarily complex "colors" that are rendered scenes themselves
• Postprocessing effects (on TexturedColors only)
• Extensible Animation system
• Video and live generation

Installation

The project was written and tested on Ubuntu 20.04 and retested on Ubuntu 22.04. It requires the following libraries

• FFmpeg libraries (Libavcodec 58.134.100, Libavformat 58.76.100, Libavutil 56.70.100, Libswscale 5.9.100)
• GLFW 3.3
• GLM 0.9.9.8
• Freetype 6.18.1

Once you have the prerequesites installed, open a terminal in this folder and perform

sh build.sh

This should produce a libvisualplane.so in the main directory. Then, if this is you first time using this library, I recommend checking out the examples:

cd examples/example_1
sh run.sh

This will compile the example code, link against the newly produced shared library and run it.

Examples

There are a number of them in the examples directory. Example_3 is the video at the top of this README.

Documentation

The documentation can be generated using doxygen. For that, run

doxygen

in this directory. This will create a folder called doc and a HTML and a Latex version of the current documentation.

Limitations and Issues

• The FFmpeg libaries in use are deprecated at this point. I should update it.
• The basic framework is established. One could add more shapes, postprocessing effects, etc.
• Don't use make, use cmake...
• More (documentation), examples.
• Various TODOs that are written down in the code.