Develop Reference

Clip by mask defined by pixel image or prevent drawing outside of that mask

I'm two days into js,html and css programming. So very newbie!
Following and building upon this TUTORIAL
Q1: How can I add this male into the background (see figuere 1.) and prohibit any strokes outside of the borders?
Adding image to background was no biggy!
function make_base()
{
base_image = new Image();
base_image.src = 'img/bmapFront.gif';
base_image.onload = function(){
context.drawImage(base_image, 0,0);
}
}
There is a context.clip function, not sure if I can use pixel form as clipping path. Making tons of "image substractions" isn't the best way.
Any suggestions
Edit:
Did the Job for me: VeryHelpful
var frontPath = new Path2D ("M 133.41,17.00 C 141.37,2.41 160.66, !VERY LONG! ")
context.clip(frontPath);
Messy strokes!
He should look like this. Then I want to save him.

Although there is such a thing as ctx.clip(), this is sometimes not what's wanted as it's impractical to use a path.
The solution that I like involves creating a virtual empty canvas onto which you draw your pixel image. Through various manipulations, like using ctx.getImageData and similar to make sure you only get one kind of color or apply other filters only once, you can obtain an image that seems to be empty (alpha of 0, mostly) in the places where you want to clip other images or paths out.
At that point, you'd use ctx.globalCompositeOperation = 'source-atop', or pick another one you might want to use from mdn's list of globalCompositeOperations.
At this point, you can just draw this virtual canvas image onto the main canvas

Javascript & Canvas: Draw and delete lines to create a "breathing" circle

I would like to create an element, that shows a red circle. Once the user clicks on it, she can record her voice. In order to show the LIVE mode, I'd like to make the circle "breath" according to the incoming frequencies.
I'm experimenting with a <canvas> element. That means it creates a circle that gets bigger and smaller, depending on the variable arcrad. However, the lines are being drawn correctly, but they do not disappear afterwards. I tried to apply .clip() but can't get it to work...
if (arcrad <= 10) arcrad = 10;
analyserContext.beginPath();
analyserContext.arc(100,120,arcrad,0,2*Math.PI);
analyserContext.closePath();
analyserContext.lineWidth = 2;
analyserContext.strokeStyle = 'red';
analyserContext.stroke();
Any ideas - or completely different strategies for this use case?

Canvas will overdraw by default. For your animation you’ll need to clean the canvas at the start of each frame. Use something the following at the start of your drawing function:
analyserContext.clearRect(0,0,200,200);
assuming your canvas is 200 pixels wide and high. It’s worth pointing out that sometimes you don’t want to completely clear the animation field every frame. For example, if you were to draw a semi transparent rectangle over the frame at the beginning (instead of clearing it) then you’d end up with a basic ‘bullet time’ style effect.

It's a normal behavior. Once something it's drawn on the canvas, it's there forever. You have to think like if you were painting something: what has been done cannot be undone.
Luckily, you still have solutions:
1) redraw another circle on top of the first one with the background color. It's really not the recommend way, but it still can be useful
2) use clearRect method (see How to clear the canvas for redrawing)

There are numerous ways to clear a canvas pre drawing to create animation:
How to clear the canvas for redrawing
simplest in my mind:
canvas.width=canvas.width;
though can equally use clearRect (which is actually quicker and won't reset the entire canvas if that is an issue regarding transforms etc!) over the region or whole canvas.
Get the likes of:
http://jsfiddle.net/dw17jxee/

Canvas element 'rubbing out' effect with JavaScript

I have a canvas <canvas></canvas> that displays a graphic of an unclean window. I need to be able to 'clean' the window with my cursor, displaying another image behind it. Just as this website uses their brushes: http://mudcu.be/sketchpad/ but rather than adding to the page, I need to remove content to display the image behind it.
Here's an example of the before and after 'rubbing out':
http://www.titaniumwebdesigns.com/images/forums/before.png http://www.titaniumwebdesigns.com/images/forums/after.png

See this complete DEMO
globalCompositeOperation is one of the most nice features in canvas api.
To achieve the desired effect, I use multiple canvas layers and globalCompositeOperation.
In this solution we have 3 layers:
Layer 1 - bottom Layer 2 - middle
Layer 3 - top
Middle and Top layers are static and only the middle layer is dynamically cleared using globalCompositeOperation.
middleCtx.globalCompositeOperation = "xor";
With globalCompositeOperation = "xor", the brush is drawn over the layer and clears the portion of canvas where it was drawn.
The final result is:
UPDATE:
To verify if the window is fully cleaned I create a hidden canvas with the same size of the others layers and drawn a black rectangle on it. When dragging the mouse over the canvas the layer 2 (middle) is cleared with a circle with transparent gradient color and now we also draw over the hidden canvas a circle with white color (might be any color different of black).
So on, we just verify the pixels of the hidden canvas and if there is no black pixels, the window is cleaned.
To get the image data we need to use something like:
imageData = context.getImageData(x, y, width, height)
and then get the pixels from the image data:
pixels = imageData.data;
The requestAnimationFrame routine is used for performance reason, because getImageData might be slow. The major change in the code is put the brush action inside an animation frame when dragging the mouse instead of do that action in each mouse move event. This allows the processor to have more time to do the pixel data verification.
Here is the modified fiddle with pixel data verification and an alert when the window is cleaned:
jsFiddle link

If you have a canvas where you have drawn a blurred image into it once, you should be able to create that effect by creating a "brush" image (an image containing a semi-transparent circle, with soft edges), and then draw that image in the canvas at the mouse coordinate using:
canvasContext.globalCompositeOperation = "destination-out";
https://developer.mozilla.org/samples/canvas-tutorial/6_1_canvas_composite.html
As soon as you have drawn the blurred image to the canvas, you just need to call the line above once and all drawn images after will use the specified composite operation.

bezier curve creation dynamically?

I am trying to achieve grass like bend on a straight line created by using Cubic bezier curve.I have created a straight line using Bezier curve and now i want to bend it from top.But the problem I am facing is I am not able to do it dynamically.The moment I use mousemove for creating the bend,series of curves appear giving the canvas a paint like look which is somthing I dont want.I just want a single curved line.My question is how do I clear the previous lines that have been drawn and restore the latest bended curve??
My CODE:here is my code if you want to have a look at it

Create two canvases stacked on top of each other:
The first one containing the static content, the other only the dynamic content.
This way you will only need to be concerned about clearing the area the grass was drawn in (and this is much faster too as there is no need to redraw static all the time).
Place the two canvases inside a div which have position set to relative, then place the canvases using position set to absolute.
Now you can make a function to draw the static content (you will need to redraw it if the browser window gets resized etc.).
Record the area the grass is drawn within and clear only this (for each grass) in the next frame.
If this last is too complicated, just use a simple clear on the "dynamic" canvas:
ctxDyn.clear(0, 0, canvasDyn.width, canvasDyn.height);
This will also preserve transparency of this canvas, or "layer" if you like.
Use requestAnimationFrame to do the actual animation.
var isPlaying = true;
function animate() {
ctxDyn.clear(0, 0, canvasDyn.width, canvasDyn.height);
drawGrass(); //function to draw the actual grass
if (isPlaying) requestAnimationFrame(animate);
}
animate(); // start
The isPlaying is a flag you can toggle with a button on screen or something similar, to be able to stop the animation. See the link for requestAnimationFrame on how to make this cross-browser as this is still a "young" implementation.
dynCtx and dynCanvas can of course be called what you want.

You need to erase the current contents of the canvas before redrawing your updated "grass". This would involve redrawing everything else that is "static" on the canvas. For example:
function redraw() {
// Erase the current contents
ctx.fillStyle = 'white';
ctx.fill(0, 0, canvas.width, canvas.height);
// Draw the stuff that does not change from frame to frame
drawStaticContent();
// Draw the dynamic content
drawGrass();
}
In your mousemove event, update your grass curve information, then 'redraw'.

html canvas motion blur with transparent background

I just created a fancy canvas effect using cheap motion blur
ctx.fillStyle = "rgba(255,255,255,0.2)";
ctx.fillRect(0,0,canvas.width,canvas.height);
Now i want to do the same, but with transparent background. Is there any way to do something like that? I'm playing with globalAlpha, but this is probably a wrong way.
PS: Google really don't like me today

Here's a more performance friendly way of doing it, it requires an invisible buffer and a visible canvas.
buffer.save();
buffer.globalCompositeOperation = 'copy';
buffer.globalAlpha = 0.2;
buffer.drawImage(screen.canvas, 0, 0, screen.canvas.width, screen.canvas.height);
buffer.restore();
Basically you draw your objs to the buffer, which being invisible is very fast, then draw it to the screen. Then you replace clearing the buffer with copying the last frame onto the buffer using the global alpha, and globalCompositeOperation 'copy' to make the buffer into a semi-transparent version of the previous frame.

You can create an effect like this by using globalAlpha and two different canvas objects: one for the foreground, and one for the background. For example, with the following canvas elements:
<canvas id="bg" width="256" height="256"></canvas>
<canvas id="fg" width="256" height="256"></canvas>
You could copy draw both a background texture and a motion blurred copied of foreground like so:
bg.globalAlpha = 0.1;
bg.fillStyle = bgPattern;
bg.fillRect(0, 0, bgCanvas.width, bgCanvas.height);
bg.globalAlpha = 0.3;
bg.drawImage(fgCanvas, 0, 0);
Here is a jsFiddle example of this.
OP asked how to do this with an HTML background. Since you can't keep a copy of the background, you have to hold onto copies of previous frames, and draw all of them at various alphas each frame. Nostalgia: the old 3dfx Voodoo 5 video card had a hardware feature called a "t-buffer", which basically let you do this technique with hardware acceleration.
Here is a jsFiddle example of that style. This is nowhere near as performant as the previous method, though.

What you are doing in the example is partially clear the screen with a semi transparent color, but as it is, you will always gonna to "add" to the alpha channel up to 1 (no transparency).
To have this working with transparent canvas (so you can see what lies below) you should subtract the alpha value instead of adding, but I don't know a way to do this with the available tools, except running all the pixels one by one and decrease the alpha value, but this will be really, really slow.

If you are keeping track of the entities on screen you can do this by spawning new entities as the mouse moves and then setting their alpha level in a tween down to zero. Once they reach zero alpha, remove the entity from memory.
This requires multiple drawing and will slow down rendering if you crank it up too much. Obviously the two-canvas approach is the simplest and cheapest from a render performance perspective but it doesn't allow you to control other features like making the "particles" move erratically or apply physics to them!