Rotating an Image with Java

In an earlier lesson we learned to load an image file into Java and display it. We also scaled the image in the program given in that lesson. Now we're going to get just a tiny bit more sophisticated, and rotate the image, as promised in the lesson introducing Java2D.

The basic graphics functions of Java allow for positioning an image in a window and scaling that image. But that's about all. If you want to rotate the image, skew it (make it look like it's leaning over) or do other things to the image you display you need to use Java2D.

What we'll do in this program is load the image as before. But before the image is drawn we will create a Java2D version of our graphics object that we're drawing to. Then we'll rotate that graphics object and draw the image. The rotation results in everything that gets drawn to the graphics area being rotated by the amount specified.

The program uses the same image of Duke as the previous one. It needs to be in the same directory as your program.

Here's the program. More discussion of the program follows the listing.

// Import the basic graphics classes.
import java.awt.*;
import javax.swing.*;
/**
 * Simple program that loads, rotates and displays an image.
 * Uses the file Duke_Blocks.gif, which should be in
 * the same directory.
 * 
 * @author MAG
 * @version 20Feb2009
 */

public class RotateImage extends JPanel{

    // Declare an Image object for us to use.
    Image image;
    
    // Create a constructor method
    public RotateImage(){
       super();
       // Load an image to play with.
       image = Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().getImage("Duke_Blocks.gif");
    }
  
    public void paintComponent(Graphics g){
         Graphics2D g2d=(Graphics2D)g; // Create a Java2D version of g.
         g2d.translate(170, 0); // Translate the center of our coordinates.
         g2d.rotate(1);  // Rotate the image by 1 radian.
         g2d.drawImage(image, 0, 0, 200, 200, this);
    }

    public static void main(String arg[]){
       JFrame frame = new JFrame("RotateImage");
       frame.setDefaultCloseOperation(JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE);
       frame.setSize(600,400);

       RotateImage panel = new RotateImage();
       frame.setContentPane(panel);  
       frame.setVisible(true);  
    }
}

Most of this program is the same as our previous one. There are a couple of significant changes, however.

One is the following line:
Graphics2D g2d=(Graphics2D)g;
In this line we're doing what's known as a "cast". We're declaring a new Graphics2D object, naming it g2d, then setting its value to our present Graphics object, g. But since g is a Graphics object, and not a Graphics2D object, we're telling it to treat g as a Graphics2D object for the purposes of this assignment. We can get away with doing this because Graphics2D is a subclass of Graphics, which makes the two classes compatible enough to allow the cast to be successful.

By doing this, we "magically" make all the Graphics2D functions available for drawing to our window.

What we want to do is rotate our image. Since we don't want to have the image go outside our graphics area when we rotate it, I've moved our "point of origin" of our graphics area using
g2d.translate(170, 0);
This moves the center point around which the drawing area is rotated from the upper left corner of the window's display area to a point 170 pixels to the right of that.

Then we use the rotate() method of our Graphics2D object, which will cause everything drawn into it to be rotated:
g2d.rotate(1);
The amount we're rotating is 1 radian, or about 57 degrees, noted by the 1 inside the parentheses.

Then we use the drawImage method of our Graphics2D object to actually draw the image into our display area.

Experiment with different values for the rotate() method to see rotation at different angles. If you lose part of the image off the edge of the window, try to use different offsets in the drawImage() method to change the location within the window at which the image gets drawn.

This is a fairly simple method for rotating an image in Java. It has some value for creating static images that are rotated, but for something like sprites in a game it's not very useful. The best method for that would be to create rotated images in a graphics program, not in your Java program. It's possible to rotate your images in Java, but it gets complicated because you have to worry about a lot of things that your graphics program does for you, like the area your new image will fill relative to the original, the background of the image, and so on.

Once you have image files of your sprite in all its possible rotated angles, load all these images to different Image object in a Java program (or better yet, an Image array or Collection), and change between them to show the image rotating.