Animated Engines | Hacker News Reader

Animated Engines

animatedengines.com

44 pointsstreblo11 comments

Fascinating. And I had no idea that most engines could be explained in a 2D picture, without the need to go 3D.

Looks cool, so I feel churlish complaining, but I'd prefer it if the speed was varied by changing the distance/rotation moved, rather than the time delay between frames. i.e. like true slow-motion from a high fps camera.

EDIT unfortunately, the approach he used precludes this: http://www.animatedengines.com/howto.shtml I guess it illustrates how rare it is to combine domain expertise (like that guy has), with an unrelated expertise in animation. If you have both (or access to them), you can make difficult things much easier, and so create value.

I think you could probably make a good case that any kind of real breakthrough combined more than one domain of knowledge.

Hi, I'm the site author. Here's an experimental SVG page that addresses your comment. I may be switching to that one of these days.

http://animatedengines.com/svg/test.xhtml

Thanks, everyone, for the kind words. And, I'd love to get your feedback on the SVG page.

-Matt

works very smooth with FF 3.0.10 on ubuntu.

I've pointed my son at it and he's been talking engines to me all day long :)

Thank you!

The SVG animation looks much nicer. It works well in Chrome 3.0.193.0 in Windows XP.

Cool, thanks. The main motion works for me (FF 2, linux, on a eeePC 900MHz), except for black circles that appear and disappear near the center, in 3 locations (only one is visible at a time, and sometimes none are).

Here's results from your test that gives performance figures (http://animatedengines.com/svg/testp.xhtml), running with several tabs open:

    fps              10      20      30      50
    Average overrun  -0.091  30.212  46.919  59.707

(I let it update a few times to settle down before pasting the figures, so they represent an average of the "average overrun").

Maybe it doesn't matter so much if the fps is slow for more complex engines? If the change between updates is small enough, it will look pretty smooth. Is it important to be able to make the machine rotate fast? I mean, it looks cool, but does the viewer gain greater understanding from this? (I'm not being rhetorical - I really don't know. Maybe it gives an overall feel for the engine's operation).

Sorry, I don't have any experience with JS animation to address the issues you mention. Some people here probably do though - or why not ask on http://stackoverflow.com ? It's often excellent for clear technical questions.

I always have a great deal of respect for a person who takes time to share knowledge is such an amazing way.

Great Job!!

As a mechanical engineer may I say, "This is simply awesome!"

I love old aircraft rotary engines:

http://www.animatedengines.com/gnome.shtml

Aside, this is one of the few sites that makes legitimate use of animated gifs.

by far my favourite:

http://www.animatedengines.com/vstirling.shtml

Reply on news.ycombinator.com