I am in the process of building a website full of SVG illustrations that have animated components that are being animated with Bodymovin.
But the backgrounds are also sometimes animating to show movement (a runner SVG with his arms & legs moving and a background SVG moving right to left showing progress).
Am I right in trying to limit using Bodymovin to the complex animations for the characters so I can use CSS transform3d animations for the simple background movements?
I'm trying to make things animate smoothly whilst being easy on everyone's browsers!
I would usually install GSAP and animate stuff with that, but that would mean adding a second JS animations library for the backgrounds as the client has a designer generating the Bodymovin animations.
Any advice would be welcome. Thanks
Bodymovin appears to be lagging with multiple animations on a page, so I ended up animating the backgrounds with CSS animations to keep the browsers' workload to a minimum.
And through animating translate3d, the css animations were smooth, too.
I have a simple blog that i'm developing using create-react-app (using react-scripts#next to get CSS Modules support).
Repo
Demo
The problem i'm having is the CSS hover transitions are very laggy and slow. I previously implemented this interface using Node EJS templates and everything was snappy and fast.
I'm thinking the problem maybe has to do with the PostSummary component receiving new props and re-rendering constantly, but all the props appear to be static once they're loaded.
I checked the Chrome performance tab and it said the majority of the cycles were being used by paint time (and not load time).
Very confused, anything I can test to resolve the issue?
When you have animations that you know will fire, it's good practice to use the will-change rule, to help the browser be more efficient.
Adding the following rule improves performance in Chrome substantially:
will-change: transform, box-shadow, z-index;
Also, check out this article. It provides AWESOME tricks to help improve the performance and animations on your website.
https://medium.com/outsystems-experts/how-to-achieve-60-fps-animations-with-css3-db7b98610108
One thing I see is that on hover you're changing the z-index. That has a possibility of slowing things down, so just be mindful when using any of the positioning rules. The transform: translate rules are much more performant than top, left, right, bottom, z-index. Not sure if you can get around using z-index or not with your design, but it's good to keep it in mind anyways.
Animating large images will cause performance issues. The first image in your example is: width: 5264px; height: 3393px;. Optimize the images for web and they should load quicker and animate smoothly.
Consider animating text and pure HTML elements, but try to avoid animating large images.
When you resize an image by transitioning it has to render the image multiple times during the transition and is very "expensive".
I am developing a website using parallax. Just a brief note on what I did so far.
I used the skrollr plugin for generating the parallax effect. With this plugin I was successfully able to move elements with different scroll speeds. However, there are a few major issues I really to resolve.
Given your understanding and guidance I look forward to get through them.
Here is what I am trying to address:
1) The site that I developed is not responsive with parallax. Data attributes for elements are written inline (and thats how so far I think they are written: inline). So because of that even on screen resize, the inline styling of data attributes remains intact. Hence, the responsive stuff for parallax (on desktop version) is not able to produce same effect on mobile versions.
2) I checked the sony website. Link : http://www.sony.com/be-moved/
They have used parallax and the site is responsive.
Parallax websites are based more on the imagery content. So, how does the site load faster when the images are of huge sizes. (Running into MBs). The sony website has very heavy images (size running into MBs). How do images of such heavy sizes load so fast?
3) Again, coming back to the sony website. On scrolling the user is shown various perspectives / angles of sony products. So, how are the multiple perspectives of every product captured for scrolling.
How is such precise sequential image with varying perspective for every product shown on scroll?
Its the entire background image that changes perspective. So, how is that done? Thats not just plain parallax, right?
I am mentioning this site because its implemented in a differenet way from other simple parallax websites. Sony's implementation is what I am interested in!
4) What would be best to do? Changing background images on scroll(like the way its done on sony) or changing the position of single elements using data attributes?. (like its done on www.numero10.ch)
I have been asked to implement parallax in two ways:
a) only move the elements within the background. Like if its a sky image with two clouds on the right. Then just consider moving the two clouds to the left on scroll.
or
b) Have different background images with the two right clouds moving to the left. So, that means I will have a volley of images for just moving the clouds from right to left; with every image having two clouds shifting towards left by pixel positions.
Looking forward for a reply. :)
Thanks for your patient reading.
I think this will lead you to the right direction: https://ihatetomatoes.net/sonys-be-moved-website-deconstructed/
It explains in detail exactly how the Be Moved website is constructed.
2) I believe they use something called "Lazy Loading" which is displaying a "fake" lighter image until all the HTML,CSS,JS is loaded to then load the real images and replace them.
3) That is not mere parallax , they are using the canvas element ( How exactly I don't know but check the page source )
4) It is better to leave an image as a fixed background and work with smaller elements.
I think that site is not just parallax layered scrolling, It is a combination of a sequence of video clips triggered on scrolling. I have not inspected the element of site but I think so. But site is loading tremendously fast compared to other such sites because of your cache in your system and implementation of lighter images in the starting and heavier images at last
I am working on a project, with no BoilerPlate, right now that uses a lot of jQuery animations such as paralax of several elements and the movement of 20 small .png images of clouds in the background (to make a cloud time-lapse) which run very slow and laggish on mobile devices. I want the same UX for both desktop and mobile environments. I am using mediaQueries to use smaller images/elements for smaller screens, but this doesn't seem to optimize mobile performance like I thought it would. I am familiar with HTML5-Boilerplate and BP-Mobile but am not sure if either one will help with my problem.
How can I make these particular effects run smoothly on mobile?
I would try to see if CSS3 animations have any effect. jQuery animate has severe performance drawbacks compared to CSS3. Even on a regular computer it is much smoother.
I've been working on a slideshow script that uses CSS3 transitions, or jQuery's animate when they are unavailable. I've created a custom function to do the slide animations, which does so appropriately. Everything seemed to be working fine, but I've hit a major snag during testing.
For one reason or another, there is an large delay applying the jQuery CSS before and after the transition on large slideshows. For example, the slideshow in the link below is around 9900 pixels wide (container width, most of which is hidden). The container is maneuvered to display the appropriate slide, using CSS3 transition and transform properties. The delay occurs applying the CSS between lines 75 - 82 in the paste below. In particular, applying the 'transition' CSS causes the problem. Add the 'transition' CSS to the stylesheet (rather than applying it with JS), and delay disappears. This isn't really a solution however, because we only want to use CSS3 transitions on specific properties, that can vary (using 'all' in the stylesheet would transition some CSS that we don't want to animate, but change regularly).
Animation function:
http://pastebin.com/9wumQvrP
Slideshow Demo:
http://www.matthewruddy.com/demo/?p=2431
The real problem is with iOS, in which the slideshow (and even the browser sometimes) becomes completely un-usable. I can't pinpoint any errors, and have really exhausted my knowledge of debugging JS. I'm sure it is related to this section of the function after playing around a bit, and disabling CSS3 support within the plugin altogether removes the problem completely.
I'm completely stuck, and really appreciate any help anyone can give.
--- Edit ---
I've tried applying the CSS with native Javascript rather than jQuery's .css function. Same results, no better performance. Also worth noting that this isn't happening at all in Firefox, and seems to only be a problem with Webkit browsers.
Anyone with a solution, would happy to make a donation towards a few beers! I really cannot figure this out!
--- Second Edit ---
Ok, so been debugging and I can see that the slowdown is caused by the browser repaint cycle that is taking a very long time. Is there a better way to handle this that the way it is already doing? Positioning the element absolutely is a known way to reduce repaints, but that isn't really working because the slideshow is responsive. Absolutely positioning the slide images or the slides themselves causes it to collapse.
--- Third Edit ---
A day later, and I've made some progress. Adding 'transition: all 0s ease' to the elements stylesheet CSS has gotten rid of the repaint caused by adding the inline CSS transition property via the custom animation function mentioned in the original post. This causes a significant performance gain, especially when removing the inline CSS transition property when the transition itself has finished.
Good stuff! However, now there is still a slowdown when the inline CSS translate is being removed (that was used to create the hardware accelerated transition effect itself) after the transition, and the left positioning is being applied. When the two happen together, there is a slowdown.
Breaking them up into two separate tasks (the translate removed, then the left position added in a setTimeout with no time specified), again gets rid of the repaints = performance gain, and looks likes problem solved. But sometimes, the CSS transition property isn't get negated fast enough, and the translate removal gets animated. No good, and don't know where to look next to work around it.
I think the problem is you're loading HUGE images :)
They are too big for the container you have them in, so you scale them down, which is even more resource intensive.
Try resizing them.
First of all congrats for your debugging!
I have been working on the exact same stuff lately and found out that ios devices don't support a large number of images positionned in the same page. It causes crashes and the only solution I found was removing elements instead of just hiding them. The downside is that removing and appending elements causes lags so you have to do it cleverly, when your transitions are done. I thought the best way to go was keep 3 or 5 images in the DOM and replacing the rest with thumbnails of the images, resized to fit the original. When transitions are done, I'd just put the large images back into place...
Hope this helps you a bit on the ios problem at least...
After spending some time analysing your code TimeLine with Chrome Dev Tools, I believe there's some optimization you could do.
As far as I can tell, every single one of your 16 images gets fully repainted every time an animation is requested. This seems quite obvious to me, as there are 16 images in your example, and the Chrome Dev Tools reports 16 long "Paint" executions every time in hit "Next".
In my humble opinion, you should figure out a solution that considers only translating two images: the one you want to hide and the one you want to show. So, consider please, not moving the rest of the images and, instead, leaving them all side-by-side to the shown image.
One more thing, using scaled down images is probably making the paint cycles quite longer. Avoid them whenever you can.
Well, think I've managed to figure it out! Just so you know, original post links don't reflect the changes as I've done them on my localhost environment.
Absolutely positioning the slides container has fixed the problem that was occurring with repaint speeds after the transition had taken place (whilst applying CSS properties). Obviously taking them out of the DOM has done the trick, allowing painting to take place much more efficiently.
I originally didn't try this too much because I knew this would add a lot of work to the resizing functionality. I had originally intended to not resize at all in JS, and rely on percentages to do the dirty work. Absolutely positioning the container would cause the slideshow viewport to collapse, rendering the native resizing useless.
However, I was already having problems with sub-pixel rendering in other browsers anyway, so I guess it was time to bite the bullet and rely on fixed pixel values. I then used JS to handle the resizing, using the window resize event. All seems good, however the slideshow was still collapsed due to the positioning. Assigning height values wasn't working correctly, so was at a bit of a loss.
Thankfully, I came across a neat little trick of setting the 'padding-top' of the slideshow viewport to a percentage value, dynamically calculated (desired slideshow height, set in the settings panel for this script, divided by desired width). As padding-top percentages are relative to the width of the element, this did a great job of providing responsive height and correcting the viewport again (no longer looking collapsed).
Here is some info on using padding-top for responsive elements that maintain aspect ratio. Great little trick: http://f6design.com/projects/responsive-aspect-ratio/
All is good now, and things are working well in iOS and webkit browsers. Everything is extremely quick and working as it should. Four days later, and it is finally figured out. Not happy about having to resort to JS for resizing, but I guess it was always going to happen due to percentage inconsistencies between browsers. Lots of decimals = no good!
Thanks to all who tried to point me in the right direction. Definitely got me thinking, and learned a lot of debugging skills that I can use again to make sure transitions are performing well. Thanks again!
not sure if this helps or not but I noticed you use 3d translation - I would think a simple 2d translation would be enough especially since your third parameter is 0 and might accelerate the issue, also go with fewer images as Armel L. suggested, don't have an iphone to test though... alternatively, this is a solution I used before css3 but should still work move the element containing the images using javascript by modifying left (?and top - the demo only moves left and right though? without the transition effects) and this way you can fine-tune the refresh rate which I think might account for the slowdown... you can go as low as 18 fps without anyone noticing, might even be good enough with just 16fps
I had this when I was first designing a magazine carousel-style page device.
If you have a series of images within a long "tray", even if they are not within the viewport, they will still take up ram, and you can effectively have five or so before leaks and nastiness begin to happen.
What I found works is "hiding" them ... But make sure they take up the physical space necessary.
What I also found worked was that one could make the 'previous' current and 'next' image are visible and move the tray, 'unhiding' them as they reach those three positions.
In my own system, I skipped the 'tray' holding e images and only had them at -100% width, 100% width and the current one a 0.
I never had much luck with the typical long-tray carousel with large scale background images... Especially with css3 acceleration.