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 implemented CCD and FABRIK IK solvers. Both solvers can solve an IK chain, but they converge differently. Which algorithm works better is very much context-dependent.

You also learned how constraints can be used to limit the range of motion for a specific joint. With the right constraints in place, an IK system modifies the current animation so that it interacts with the environment. You explored how to achieve this in the feet grounding section of this chapter.

In the downloadable content for this book, there are 4 samples for this chapter. Sample00 contains the code up to this point. Sample01 demonstrates how a CCD solver can be used, and Sample02 demonstrates how a FABRIK solver can be used. Sample03 demonstrates foot clamping and ground alignment for a character walking along a path.

In the next chapter, you will learn how dual quaternions can be used for skinning. Dual quaternion skinning better maintains the volume of a mesh than linear...