Lessons Learned from Sixty Days of Re-Animating Zombies with Hand-Coded CSS

Caution: Terrible sense of humor ahead. We’ll talk about practical stuff, but the examples pretty much all involve zombies and silly jokes. You have been warned.

I’ll be linking to individual Pens as I discuss the lessons I learned, but if you’d like to get a sense of the entire project, check out 60 days of Animation on Undead Institute. I started this project to end on August 1st, 2020, coinciding with the publication of a book I wrote featuring CSS animation, humor, and zombies — because, obviously, zombies will destroy the world if you don’t brandish your web skills and stop the apocalypse. Nothing puts the hurt on the horde like a HTML element on the move!

I had a few rules for myself throughout the project. 

1. I would hand-code all CSS. (I’m a masochist.)
2. The user would initiate all of the animation. (I hate coming upon an animation that’s already halfway through.) 
3. I would use JavaScript as little as possible and never for animation. (I only ended up using JavaScript once, and that was to start audio with the final animation. I have nothing against JavaScript, it’s just not what I wanted to do here.)

Lesson 1: Eighty days is a long time.

Uh, doesn’t the title say “sixty” days? Yes, but my original goal was to do eighty days and as day one approached with less than twenty animations prepared and a three day average for each production, I freaked out and switched to sixty days. That gave me both twenty more days till the beginning date and twenty fewer pieces to do.

Lesson 1A: Sixty days is still a long time.

That’s a lot of animation to do with a limited amount of time, ideas, and even more limited artistic skills. And while I thought of dropping to thirty days, I’m glad I didn’t. Sixty days stretched me and forced me to go deeper into how CSS animation — and by extension, CSS itself — works. I’m also proudest of many of the later pieces I did as my skills increased, and I had to be more innovative and think harder about how to make things interesting. Once you’ve used all the easy options, the actual work and best results begin. (And yes, it ended up being sixty-two days because I started on June 1 and wanted to do a final animation on August 1. Starting June 3 just felt icky and wrong.)

So, the real Lesson 1: stretch yourself.

Lesson 2: Interactive animations are hard, and even harder to make responsive.

If you want something to fly across the screen and connect with another element or appear to start another element’s move, you must use either all standard, inflexible units or all flexible units. 

Three variables determine when and where an animated element will be during any animation: duration, velocity, and distance. The duration of the animation is set in the animation property and cannot be changed in relation to screen size. The animation timing function determines the velocity; screen size can’t change that either. Thus, if the distance varies with the screen size, the timing will be off everywhere except a specific screen width and height. 

Look at Tank!. Run the animation at wide and narrow screen sizes. While I got the timing close, if you compare the two, you’ll see that the tank is in a different place relative to the zombies when the last zombies fall.

To avoid these timing issues, you can use fixed units and a large number, like 2000 or 5000 pixels or more, so that the animation will cover the width (or height) of the screen for all but the largest monitors.  

Lesson 3: If you want a responsive animation, put everything in (one of the) viewport units.

Going halfsies on unit proportions (e.g. setting width and height in pixels, but location and movement with viewport units) will lead to unpredictable results. Don’t use both vw and vh either but one or the other; whichever will be the dominant orientation. Mixing vh and vw units will make your animation go “wonky” which I believe is the technical term. 

Take Superbly Zomborrific, for instance. It mixes pixel, vw, and vh units. The premise is that the Super Zombie is flying upward as the “camera” follows. Super Zombie smashes into a ledge and falls as the camera continues, but you wouldn’t understand that if your screen was sufficiently tall.

That also means that if you need something to come in from the top — like I did in Nobody Here But Us Humans —you must set the vw height high enough to ensure that the ninja zombie isn’t visible at most aspect ratios.

Lesson 3A: Use pixel units for movements within an SVG element.

All that said, transforming elements within an SVG element should not use viewport units. SVG tags are their own proportional universe. The SVG “pixel” will stay proportional within the SVG element to all the other SVG element children while viewport units will not. So transform with pixel units within an SVG element, but use viewport units everywhere else.

Lesson 4: SVGs scale horribly at runtime.

For animations, like Oops…, I made the SVG image of the zombie scale up to five times his size, but that makes the edges fuzzy. [Shakes fist at “scalable” vector graphics.]

/* Original code resulting in fuzzy edges */
.zombie {
  transform: scale(1);
  width: 15vw;
}

.toggle-checkbox:checked ~ .zombie {
  animation: 5s ease-in-out 0s reverseshrinkydink forwards;
}

@keyframes reverseshrinkydink {
  0% {
    transform: scale(1);
  }
  100% {
    transform: scale(5);
  }
}

I learned to set their dimensions to the final dimensions that would be in effect at the end of the animation, then use a scale transform to shrink them down to the size for the start of the animation. 

/* Revised code */
.zombie {
  transform: scale(0.2);
  width: 75vw;
}

.toggle-checkbox:checked ~ .zombie {
  animation: 5s ease-in-out 0s reverseshrinkydink forwards;
}

@keyframes reverseshrinkydink {
  0% {
    transform: scale(0.2);
  }
  100% {
    transform: scale(1);
  }
}

In short, the revised code moves from a scaled-down version of the image up to the full width and height. The browser always renders at 1, making the edges crisp and clean at a scale of 1. So instead of scaling from 1 to 5, I scaled from 0.2 to 1.

Lesson 5: The axis Isn’t a universal truth.

An element’s axes stay in sync with the element, not the page. A 90-degree rotation before a translateX will change the direction of the translateX from horizontal to vertical. In Nobody Here But Us Humans… 2, I flipped the zombies using a 180-degree rotation. But positive Y values move the ninjas towards the top, and negative ones move them towards the bottom (the opposite of normal). Beware of how a rotation may affect transforms further down the line.

Lesson 6. Separate complex animations into concentric elements to make easier adjustments.

When creating a complex animation that moves in multiple directions, adding wrapper divs, or rather parent elements, and animating each one individually will cut down on conflicting transforms, and prevent you from becoming a weepy mess.

For instance, in Space Cadet, I had three different transforms going on. The first is the zomb-o-naut’s moving in an up and down motion. The second is a movement across the screen. The third is a rotation. Rather than trying to do everything in a single transform, I added two wrapping elements and did one animation on each element (I also saved my hair… at least some of it.) This helped avoid the axis issues discussed in the last lesson because I performed the rotation on the innermost element, leaving its parent’s and grandparent’s axes in place.

Lesson 7: SVG and CSS transforms are the same.

Some paths and groups and other SVG elements will already have transforms defined on them. It could be from an optimization algorithm, or perhaps it’s just how the illustration software generates the code. If a path, group, or whatever element in an SVG already has an SVG transform on it, removing that transform will reset the element, often to a bizarre location or size compared to the rest of the drawing. 

Since SVG and CSS transforms are the same, any CSS transform you do replaces the SVG transform, meaning your CSS transform will start from that bizarre location or size rather than the location or size that is set in the the SVG.

You can copy the transform from the SVG element to your CSS and set it as the starting position in CSS (updating it to the CSS syntax first, of course). You can then modify it in your CSS animation.

For instance, in Uhhh, Yeah…, my tribute to Office Space, Undead Lumbergh’s right upper arm (the #arm2 element) had a transform on it in the original SVG code.

<path id="arm2" fill="#91c1a3" fill-rule="nonzero" d="M0 171h9v9H0z" transform="translate(0 -343) scale(4 3.55)"/>

Moving that transform to CSS like this:

<path id="arm2" fill="#91c1a3" fill-rule="nonzero" d="M0 171h9v9H0z"/>

#arm2 {
  transform: translate(0, -343px) scale(4, 3.55);
}

…I could then create an animation that doesn’t accidentally reset the location and scale:

.toggle-checkbox:checked ~ .z #arm2 { 
  animation: 6s ease-in-out 0.15s arm2move forwards;
}

@keyframes arm2move {
  0%, 100% {
    transform: translate(0, -343px) scale(4, 3.55);
  }
  40%, 60% {
    transform: translate(0, -403px) scale(4, 3.55);
  }
  50% {
    transform: translate(0, -408px) scale(4, 3.55);
  }
} 

This process is harder when the tool generating the SVG code attempts to “simplify” the transform into a matrix. While you can recreate the matrix transform by copying it into the CSS, it is a difficult task to do. You’re a better developer than me — which might be true anyway — if you can take a matrix transform and manipulate it to scale, rotate, or translate in the exact way you want.

Alternatively, you can recreate the matrix transform using translation, rotation, and scaling, but if the path is complex, the likelihood that you can recreate it in a timely manner without finding yourself in a straight jacket is low. 

The last and probably easiest option is to wrap the element in a group (<g>) tag. Add a class or ID to it for easy CSS access and transform the group itself, thus separating out the transforms as discussed in the last lesson. 

Lesson 8: Keep your sanity by using transform-origin when transforming part of an SVG

The CSS transform-origin property moves the point around which the transform happens. If you’re trying to rotate an arm — like I did in Clubbin’ It —  your animation will look more natural if you rotate the arm from the center of the shoulder, but that path’s natural transform origin is in the upper-left. Use transform-origin to fix this for smoother, more natural feel… you know that really natural pixel art look…

Transforming the origin can also be useful when scaling, like I did in Mustachioed Oops, or when rotating mouth movements, such as the dinosaur’s jaw in Super Tasty. If you don’t change the origin, the transforms will use an origin point at the upper left corner of the SVG element. 

Lesson 9: Sprite animations can be responsive

I ended up doing a lot of sprite animations for this project (i.e., where you use multiple, incremental frames and switch between them fast enough that the characters seem to move). I created the images in one wide file, added them as a background image to an element the size of a single frame, used background-size to set the background image to the width of the image, and hid the overflow. Then I used background-position and the animation timing function, step(), to walk through the images; for example: Post-Apocalyptic Celebrations.

Before the project, I always used inflexible images. I’d scale things down a little so that there would be at least a little responsive give, but I didn’t think you could make it a fully flexible width. However, if you use SVG as the background image you can then use viewport units to scale the element along with the changing screen size. The only problem is the background position. However, if you use viewport units for that, it will stay in sync. Check that out in Finally, Alone with my Sandwich…

Lesson 9A: Use viewport units to set the background size of an image when creating responsive sprite animation

As I’ve learned throughout this project, using a single type of unit  is almost always the way to go. Initially, I’d set my sprite’s background size using percentages. The math was easy (100% * (number of steps + 1)) and it worked fine in most cases. In longer animations, however, the exact frame tracking could be off and parts of the wrong sprite frame might display. The problem grows as more frames are added to the sprite. 

I’m not sure the exact reason this causes an issue, but I believe it’s because of rounding errors that compound over the length of the sprite sheet (the amount of the shift increases with the number of frames). 

For my final animation, It Ain’t Over Till the Zombie Sings, I had a dinosaur open his mouth to reveal a zombie Viking singing (while lasers fired in the background plus there was dancing, accordions playing and zombies fired from cannons, of course). Yeah, I know how to throw a party… a nerd party.

The dinosaur and viking was one of the longest sprite animations I did for the project. But when I used percentages to set the background size, the tracking would be off at certain sizes in Safari. By the end of the animation, part of the dinosaur’s nose from a different frame would appear to the right and a similar part of the nose would be missing on the left.

This was super frustrating to diagnose because it seemed to work fine in Chrome and I’d think I fixed it in Safari only to look at a slightly different screen size and see the frame off again. However, if I used consistent units — i.e. vw for background-size, frame width, and background-position — everything worked fine. Again, it comes down to working with consistent units!

Lesson 10: Invite people into the project.

While I learned tons of things during this process, I beat my head against the wall for most of it (often until the wall broke or my head did… I can’t tell). While that’s one way to do it, even if you’re hard-headed, you’ll still end up with a headache. Invite others into your project, be it for advice, to point out an obvious blind spot you missed, provide feedback, help with the project, or simply to encourage you to keep going when the scope is stupidly and arbitrarily large. 

So let me put this lesson into practice. What are your thoughts? How will you stop the zombie hordes with CSS animation? What stupidly and arbitrarily large project will you take on to stretch yourself?