Book Image

Hands-On C++ Game Animation Programming

By : Gabor Szauer
Book Image

Hands-On C++ Game Animation Programming

By: Gabor Szauer

Overview of this book

Animation is one of the most important parts of any game. Modern animation systems work directly with track-driven animation and provide support for advanced techniques such as inverse kinematics (IK), blend trees, and dual quaternion skinning. This book will walk you through everything you need to get an optimized, production-ready animation system up and running, and contains all the code required to build the animation system. You’ll start by learning the basic principles, and then delve into the core topics of animation programming by building a curve-based skinned animation system. You’ll implement different skinning techniques and explore advanced animation topics such as IK, animation blending, dual quaternion skinning, and crowd rendering. The animation system you will build following this book can be easily integrated into your next game development project. The book is intended to be read from start to finish, although each chapter is self-contained and can be read independently as well. By the end of this book, you’ll have implemented a modern animation system and got to grips with optimization concepts and advanced animation techniques.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)

Chapter 10: Mesh Skinning

Deforming a mesh to match an animated pose is called skinning. In order to implement skinning, you first need to declare a mesh class. Once you have declared a mesh class, it can be deformed using a shader (GPU skinning) or just with C++ code (CPU skinning). Both of these skinning methods are covered in this chapter. By the end of this chapter, you should be able to do the following:

  • Understand how a skinned mesh is different from a non-skinned mesh
  • Understand the entire skinning pipeline
  • Implement a skeleton class
  • Load the bind pose of a skeleton from a glTF file
  • Implement a skinned mesh class
  • Load skinned meshes from a gLTF file
  • Implement CPU skinning
  • Implement GPU skinning