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)

Technical requirements

This chapter will cover every concept of glTF files that you will need to load and display animated models. The chapter, however, is not a complete guide to the file format. Before reading this chapter, take a few minutes to familiarize yourself with the glTF format by reading the reference guide at https://www.khronos.org/files/gltf20-reference-guide.pdf.

You will be using cgltf (https://github.com/jkuhlmann/cgltf) to parse glTF files. If a glTF file isn't displaying properly, it might be a bad file. If you suspect a file might be bad, check it against the glTF reference viewer at https://gltf-viewer.donmccurdy.com/.