Thread: Best way to do Win32 animation

I've made a program which simulates an orbit, and generates coordinates for two objects relative to eachother. Now, I am interested in displaying these two objects (via the sets of coordinates) in some kind of animation, which shows the two objects orbiting eachother. I have no experience at all with animation, so I wouldn't know where to start. I would imagine that this is a fairly simple animation case (plotting points based on variables from the program) so can anyone direct me to the right starting point?

Thanks a lot.

You can do a transform to 'animate' the objects although I would not call this an animation.

You can use frames or frames of reference and perform a heirarchichal transform.

Transform = Child * Parent * ... * Parent * Root
M(F) = M(x) * M(x - 1) * ... * M(1) * M(0)

The easiest way to do this is to write a simple 4x4 matrix class that support concatenation and use the results to orient your objects.

That sounds interesting - although all I have is the output values at the moment, and I have no experience in placing or animating objects. Could I use OpenGL or Windows Forms (I also have no experience in these!)?

Thanks.