Animating bulky objects in WPF

Question

Is it a good idea to render the Controls to a Bitmap and then animate the bitmap, rather than animating the controls itself?

Lets say I have a grid with 100 objects, and I want to move the grid via an animation, here, rather than moving the grid, is it better to render an image of the grid to a Bitmap and then move that bitmap, after the animation is completed, I can re-position the grid and delete the bitmap

Is this a good method?

Answer 1

Is this a good method?

This will typically be far slower than just animating the controls. Rendering to a bitmap is a (relatively) slow procedure, and then swapping out the controls for the bitmaps will cause layout updates.

In general, a properly designed animation will likely be better than trying to do an animation based on images.

Answer 2

I suspect that RenderTransform will do exactly this so doing it by hand might be slower.

Have a look at the CacheMode property. It might help as long as you do not change properties of the controls that are being animated during the animation (thereby invalidating the cache).