# Animation with colors in AIMMS¶

<![CDATA[<img class=”alignright size-thumbnail wp-image-2674” src=”http://techblog.aimms.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2013/02/screenshot-pivttable-heatmap-150x150.png” alt=”screenshot-pivttable-heatmap” width=”150” height=”150” />In the first post of this year (<a title=”Happy New Year” href=”http://blog.aimms.com/2013/01/happy-new-year/”>Happy New Year</a>) I showed how you can use the network object in AIMMS to create an animation of exploding fireworks. In another recent post (<a title=”Using colors for feedback in pivot table” href=”http://blog.aimms.com/2013/02/using-colors-for-feedback-in-pivot-table/”>Using colors for feedback in pivot table</a>)I showed how you can use the pivot table in AIMMS to display a heat map.

In this new post, I will show how you can use the user color related functions UserColorAdd and UserColorDelete in AIMMS to create an animation of the heat map that is displayed on the right.

The goal is to create an animation that will morph the picture such that each point that starts out as green ends up as red and vice versa.

On the left you can see a small screencast of the final animation we want to achieve. In order to do this, I have created 765 (3x255) user colors in a specific palette that fades from red to green to red to green.

By letting each point take the next color in every iteration of the animation, you end up with an animation. You can generate user colors programmatically with the intrinsic procedure UserColorAdd. This procedure takes 4 arguments: the first one is the name of the new user color and the other three arguments are the values for the Red/Green/Blue components (all values between 0 and 255).

Note that a call to UserColorAdd will fail in case there already exists a color with the given name. Therefore, I use the following code that uses UserColorDelete to delete the user color with the names I need before I start adding them:

 1 2 3 4 5 6 !Delete any color that we need if it already exists. while LoopCount <= pNumColors do if stringtoElement(AllColors, "color-" + (loopcount) , 0) then UserColorDelete( "color-" + (loopcount) ) ; endif ; endwhile ; 

To create a a range of colors that fades from red to green, we have to start with only red and no green and keep on increasing the green components while decreasing the red component.

You can achieve this in AIMMS code with the LoopCount operator as follows:

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 !Original palette uses red for the lowest value and green for the highest value !This means that the Red component of the color decreases and the Green component !of the color increases while LoopCount <= 255 do UserColorAdd( color_name : "color-" + loopCount , red : 255 - Loopcount , green : LoopCount , blue : 0 ) ; endwhile ; 

For an example of how this palette looks, you can open the project (see link below) and click on the button “Color demo page”. You will see a palette that looks similar to:

I have implemented all of the above in a modified version of the 3D Chart example (which comes with the default installation of AIMMS). You can download my modified version from the link below. Note that this project requires AIMMS 3.13 to run.

Last Updated: June, 2019