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)

Summary

In this chapter, you learned the difference between a bind pose and a rest pose. You also created a Skeleton class that contains them both. You learned about the general concept of skinning—both rigid (one bone per vertex) and smooth (multiple bones per vertex) skinning.

In this chapter, we implemented a primitive mesh class and we covered the process of skinning a mesh on both the CPU and GPU, as well as loading a bind pose out of a glTF file that does not store bind pose data.

You can now apply the skills you learned. With the skinning code complete, you can display fully animated models. The models can be loaded from glTF files, which is an open file format specification.

In the downloadable samples for this book, Chapter10/Sample01 contains a sample that draws the rest pose, bind pose, and current animated pose. Chapter10/Sample02 demonstrates how to use both GPU and CPU skinning.

In the next chapter, you will learn how to optimize various aspects of...