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)

Introducing dual quaternions

A dual quaternion combines linear and rotational transformations together into one variable. This single variable can be interpolated, transformed, and concatenated. A dual quaternion can be represented with two quaternions or eight floating-point numbers.

Dual numbers are like complex numbers. A complex number has a real part and an imaginary part, and a dual number has a real part and a dual part. Assuming is the dual operator, a dual number can be represented as , where and .

Operations on dual numbers are done as imaginary numbers, where the dual components and real components must be acted on separately. For example, dual quaternion addition can be expressed in the following way:

Notice how the real and dual parts are added independently.

Important note

If you are interested in the more formal mathematics behind dual quaternions, check out A Beginner's Guide to Dual-Quaternions by Ben Kenwright, at https://cs.gmu.edu/~jmlien...