We have a Silverlight 2 project (game) that will require a lot of character animation. Can anyone suggest a good way to do this. Currently we plan to build the art in Illustrator, imported to Silverlight via Mike Snow's plug-in as this matches the skills our artists have.
Is key framing the animations our only option here? And if it is, what's the best way to do it? Hundreds of individual png's or is there some way in Silverlight to draw just a portion of a larger image?
Silverlight at this time does not support bitmap effects nor has any libraries to manipulate the images. Your option now is to use keyframe animations from one png to another.
Now you can get at the raw bytes of an image. If you have your own image processing libraries you can compile them with the Silverlight dlls and then use the library in your Silverlight app.
You can use the Clip property on the image itself or on a container for the image to display a specific piece of a larger image, like a sprite sheet. This may or may not be more performant than swapping pngs. Also you could use the ImageBrush on a Rectangle to show just what you want, this would probably be a bit more efficient than the Clip property.