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)

Chapter 5: Implementing Transforms

In this chapter, you will implement a structure that holds position, rotation, and scale data. This structure is a transform. A transform maps from one space to another space. Position, rotation, and scale could also be stored in a 4x4 matrix, so why would you want to use an explicit transform struct instead of a matrix? The answer is interpolation. Matrices don't interpolate well, but transform structures do.

Interpolating between two matrices is difficult because rotation and scale are stored in the same components of the matrix. Because of this, interpolating between two matrices doesn't yield the result you would expect. Transforms solve this problem by storing the position, rotation, and scale components separately.

In this chapter, you will implement a transform structure and the common operations that you need to be able to perform in transforms. By the end of this chapter, you should be able to do the following:

  • Understand...