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)

Faster sampling

The current animation-clip sampling code performs well, so long as each animation lasts under 1 second. With multiple minute-long animation clips, such as a cutscene, the animation system's performance starts to suffer. Why does the performance worsen with longer animations? The culprit is the following bit of code in the Track::FrameIndex function:

    for (int i = (int)size - 1; i >= 0; --i) {
        if (time >= mFrames[i].mTime) {
            return i;
        }
    }

The presented loop goes through every frame in the track. If an animation has a lot of frames, the performance starts to get worse. Remember, this bit of code is executed for each animated component of each animated bone in an animation clip.

This function currently does a linear search, but it can be...