How do I apply a perspective transform to a UIView?

Question

I'm looking to perform a perspective transform on a UIView (such as seen in coverflow)

Does anyonew know if this is possible?

I've investigated using CALayer and have run through all the pragmatic programmer Core Animation podcasts, but I'm still no clearer on how to create this kind of transform on an iPhone.

Any help, pointers or example code snippets would be really appreciated!

Answer 1

As Ben said, you'll need to work with the UIView's layer, using a CATransform3D to perform the layer's rotation. The trick to get perspective working, as described here, is to directly access one of the matrix cells of the CATransform3D (m34). Matrix math has never been my thing, so I can't explain exactly why this works, but it does. You'll need to set this value to a negative fraction for your initial transform, then apply your layer rotation transforms to that. You should also be able to do the following:

Objective-C

UIView *myView = [[self subviews] objectAtIndex:0];
CALayer *layer = myView.layer;
CATransform3D rotationAndPerspectiveTransform = CATransform3DIdentity;
rotationAndPerspectiveTransform.m34 = 1.0 / -500;
rotationAndPerspectiveTransform = CATransform3DRotate(rotationAndPerspectiveTransform, 45.0f * M_PI / 180.0f, 0.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f);
layer.transform = rotationAndPerspectiveTransform;

Swift 5.0

if let myView = self.subviews.first {
    let layer = myView.layer
    var rotationAndPerspectiveTransform = CATransform3DIdentity
    rotationAndPerspectiveTransform.m34 = 1.0 / -500
    rotationAndPerspectiveTransform = CATransform3DRotate(rotationAndPerspectiveTransform, 45.0 * .pi / 180.0, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0)
    layer.transform = rotationAndPerspectiveTransform
}

which rebuilds the layer transform from scratch for each rotation.

A full example of this (with code) can be found here, where I've implemented touch-based rotation and scaling on a couple of CALayers, based on an example by Bill Dudney. The newest version of the program, at the very bottom of the page, implements this kind of perspective operation. The code should be reasonably simple to read.

The sublayerTransform you refer to in your response is a transform that is applied to the sublayers of your UIView's CALayer. If you don't have any sublayers, don't worry about it. I use the sublayerTransform in my example simply because there are two CALayers contained within the one layer that I'm rotating.