Is WebGL or Canvas the only way to get SVG Keyframe Animations Hardware Accelerated?

Question

What I'm looking is a flash alternative for mobile phones using html5.

I was looking into SVG and it seems the only way to get hardware acceleration is to use CSS transforms on it. But CSS transforms aren't enough, I want to animate the actual nodes that make up a vector (ie, points on a path) so I could get more sophisticated character animation. To do this I was looking at some gui based editors.

I checked what adobe has been up to and they seem to have killed Edge Animate and rebranded Flash as "Animate CC" for 2016.

http://blogs.adobe.com/creativecloud/update-about-edge-tools-and-services/ https://blogs.adobe.com/flashpro/welcome-adobe-animate-cc-a-new-era-for-flash-professional/

But reading up on "Animate CC" I see that it exports vector animations to either Canvas or WebGL. Which I think is due to them not getting hardware acceleration with native SVG via SMIL or using javascript. https://css-tricks.com/guide-svg-animations-smil/

Another one is http://www.animatron.com which converts everything to canvas as well.

So my question is, in order to do keyframe animations on nodes within a vector path, a vector needs to be converted to either WebGL or Canvas for it to be hardware accelerated on mobile?

p.s I prefer using SVG as it's loaded in the DOM and I can manipulate things with jquery. This is for a mobile game that uses vectors (svg) as its base but I'd like to incorporate animations too - beyond the basic css transforms. I wish there was a way to have a .svg file that not only contains the vector information but also the animation info. so I could load this .svg file. and then in javascript go: character1.play('animation1') or something. If SMIL worked fast I'm sure editors like adobe would make it as simple as that.

EDIT: I just read that Chrome 45 killed SMIL in favor of "web animations" and css. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/SVG/SVG_animation_with_SMIL And as Kaiido mentioned in the comments IE never supported smil so maybe that's why adobe never exported to it (?). http://caniuse.com/#feat=svg-smil also I never saw any examples online that show hardware accelerated path animation with smil, if any of you guys find a link pls let me know.

EDIT #2: I'm thinking of giving up my wishful thinking and instead looking at vector to canvas exporters like animatron.com. However, it doesn't seem like canvas is even hardware accelerated or fast like css3 transforms. I loaded some animations from animatron in my old iPhone 4s/iOS 8 and it's jittery and slow for example: https://www.animatron.com/project/1953f3526e5b2ec4eef429c8 whereas css3 transform animations always run very smooth...

I still haven't tested vector to webgl.. but I think that's why adobe eventually chose to use it for their vector animations since canvas is slow and svg is limited.

EDIT #3: sure enough it seems like webgl is the way to go (unless someone finds a way to do this with native svg) http://www.yeahbutisitflash.com/?p=7231 .. this works fast in my iphone 4s/ios8.. I currently think this is the only way to do what I want: hardware accelerated vector based animation (however the graphics don't look as crisp as I'd want them.. webgl kinda messed with that I think). but this is why I think Edge Animate got killed cause they were trying to create a tool that took advantage of css3 transforms, but ppl want to animate vector nodes so they went back to Flash and rebranded it. (another note: the above webgl anim doesn't work so well on my galaxy S4/kitkat android phone.. so this is mainly for newer devices/OSs)

EDIT #4: come to think of it. it'd be a pain to have multiple webgl contexts running in my program. so if I had 10 animated characters I'd have to have 10 webgl contexts which would be intense for a mobile device.. unless I chose to do the whole game in flash, and then I'd have one big webgl context after I export it. but I prefer to work in the dom. oh well css3 transforms for the meantime.. :/

EDIT #5 - Dec 2016: I'm now using svg/javascript with snap.svg. modern phones seem fast enough.

Other Useful Links I Found:

http://www.crmarsh.com/svg-performance/

Answer 1

Canvas is (as far as i know) software accelerated. So it's rendered by the processor (CPU). The processor (cause of them pixels) ain't that good at graphical stuff but for simple things it would be enough. And it runs everywhere, where there is a processor.

If you want to have better performance on hardware accelerated devices which most modern smartphones are, you need webgl. But you can export your stuff in webgl from adobe CC. Older smartphones are not very optimized on hardware acceleration so please check with your target group what devices they have and try to run your app on one of the slowest devices.

I would not use SVG. SVG is even worse than DOM. You can be faster manipulating HTML in javascript than SVG. I don't know why but it is damn slow. SVG is just an alternative if you want to have scalable graphics or charts and that's what it is made for. To animate in SVG is a pain. Don't do it. It is not optimized for animation.

CSS-Transform is a prototype-like and will not help you with keyframe animation. But it has potential to have an eye on it.

Does this help you?

Answer 2

I think its a difficult question to answer as there's so many issues with different browsers. Some don't support SMIL transforms well (or being deprecated, but as mentioned there are fills for it), some don't support CSS3 transforms on SVG elements at all, so most of the 'solutions' out there, have some issue that may need to be compromised on. I think one browser doesn't support d attribute morph properly, but I can't recall which (so test this early on with required browsers if you do go down this route).

Canvas does typically seem to perform better on mobile for most animation I've seen or played with, certainly as the number of objects increases on page.

Other alternatives to webGL that was mentioned..

One option that kinda springs to mind is fabric.js, which is a canvas approach to SVG. It will take the same commands, elements as SVG, but display it on an HTML5 canvas. Turn off drag/freetransform within it (as I think its slowed down a bit with this if it needs extra checks), and I think it will be a bit faster, but its a while since I've played. This could be an interesting approach if you don't need specific DOM element access, but would be fine if you are ok with a similar object based setup.

If you insist on using SVG, then I would look at integrating it with another library (or even 2). Snap or SVG.js are both decent, but can be a bit slow. However, I would experiment with using Velocity.js or React.js with that svg library, as they have some methods that can squeeze out a bit more performance. Also GSAP may be worth a look.

Answer 3

There is no general answer to this, it depends on the browser implementation and your hardware, but ... for the long term solution I would bet on WebGL because it uses the GPU and will ultimately dominate.

WebGL is not well supported right now (2016), and it potentially comes with security issues. Also see: https://css-tricks.com/rendering-svg-paths-in-webgl/

Canvas is better at working on raw 2d pixel buffers (+ alpha channel) and is slow for higher resolution+animation. You could use some dual lib like Pixi though.

Answer 4

If you don't mind the k-weight increasing a bit and are comfortable using flash, the easiest and the fastest solution would be to use Animate CC (It's exactly Flash, without the symbol filters and gives canvas output instead of swf).

Answer 5

This library/plugin might be exactly what you are looking for: Greensock SVG Morph Plugin. It seems to perform pretty well on mobile, not sure how well it performs on devices mentioned by you.

It's also not GPU accelerated but Greensock Animation Platform seems to perform extremely well even on mobile devices.