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)

Creating camera matrices

Matrices are also used for camera transformations, including perspective transforms. A perspective transform maps a frustum to NDC space. NDC space typically has a range of -1 to +1 on all axes. Unlike world/eye coordinates, NDC space is left-handed.

In this section, you will learn how to create camera transformation matrices. The first camera matrix is a frustum, which looks like a pyramid with the tip cut off. A frustum represents everything that is visible to the camera. You will also learn how to create different projections and how to implement a "look at" function that lets you easily create a view matrix.

Frustum

Visually, a frustum looks like a pyramid with the tip cut off. A frustum has six sides; it represents the space that a camera can see. Create the frustum function in mat4.cpp. This function takes left, right, bottom, top, near, and far values:

mat4 frustum(float l, float r, float b, 
      ...