Member Avatar for swissknife007

I am a beginner to computer graphics and I have to add animations to the image of my national flag which look like this.

I have designed the flag alright.But I don't know what kinds of animations are possible and how.
Could someone please guide me how to add animations like fluttering and which functions/methods I should use to achieve them.
Any help will be greatly appreciated.
Also I am not looking/asking for complete code I am looking for pointers and guidance and any specific information that could be useful to me in this task .

Edited by swissknife007 because: n/a
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  • Latest Post Latest Post by peter_budo

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A short expert summary and practical pointers that extend the replies from , and .

graphics.h comes from the old Borland BGI system and is effectively legacy/DOS-era tooling; it is fine for learning but not for building portable, accelerated animation today. See Borland Graphics Interface (BGI). (en.wikipedia.org)
(BGI reference: Borland Graphics Interface (BGI).)

For a simple 2D waving-flag effect on modern toolchains, use a library that exposes textured vertex geometry or shaders (instead of immediate-mode pixel drawing). Libraries like SFML or SDL give easy windowing + textures and let you build a textured vertex mesh or use a shader for the deformation. The SFML vertex-array/texturing approach is a good, simple fit. (sfml-dev.org)
(SFML vertex-array tutorial: Designing your own entities with vertex arrays.)

Practical approaches (in increasing realism / complexity):

  • Fast and easy: render the flag as a textured mesh (grid of vertices) and offset vertex positions each frame with a sine function across the X axis; attenuate the offset near the flagpole so the pole area stays fixed. A tiny pseudocode example:
for each vertex at x:
  offset = A * sin(k*x + omega * time) * (1.0 - attachWeight*x)
  vertex.y += offset
draw textured triangles using the mesh

A classic OpenGL-style tutorial shows exactly this grid + sine technique for a flag wave. (nehe.gamedev.net)
(Example tutorial: NeHe — flag waving / waving texture.)

If a more physically plausible result is required, implement a mass–spring (or position-based) cloth simulator: a grid of particles connected by springs, simple integration (Verlet or semi-implicit), iterative constraint projection (to prevent over-stretch), damping, and fixed vertices at the pole. That is the standard approach used in real-time cloth systems. (en.wikipedia.org)
(Background: Soft-body dynamics / cloth simulation.)

Implementation notes / gotchas: keep a fixed timestep for simulation, run a few solver iterations per frame for stability, reduce mesh resolution for speed, and render with double buffering / vsync to avoid flicker and tearing. (en.wikipedia.org)
(Background: Multiple buffering / double buffering.)

These pointers follow /’s advice about moving off archaic headers, while giving concrete, low-effort techniques ( can start with the sine-mesh method) and a path toward a physics-based solution if higher realism is needed.

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Member Avatar for zeroliken

Why would you want to create an animation with graphics.h which is a very old and deprecated library?

Anyway here's a thread with a similar problem that talks about how the flag should have a wave like motion
-->link to said thread

Edited by zeroliken because: n/a
Member Avatar for Ancient Dragon

graphics.h is not part of c or c++ standards, so very few compilers support it. On MS-Windows the only compilers I know about that use it are Turbo C, which is ancient and obsolete. If you want graphics on modern operating systems then you need to learn modern compilers. Turbo C is nice to use for just your own programming enjoyment, but don't expect anyone else in the world to use it.

Member Avatar for peter_budo

Thread closed as it is double post, please follow discussion here

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