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)

Exploring the glTF format

The root of a glTF file is the scene. A glTF file can contain one or more scenes. A scene contains one or more nodes. A node can have a skin, a mesh, an animation, a camera, a light, or blend weights attached to it. Meshes, skins, and animations each store large chunks of information in buffers. To access a buffer, they contain an accessor that contains a buffer view, which in turn contains the buffer.

A description provided through text can be very hard to follow. The following diagram illustrates the file layout described. Since glTF is a scene description format, there are a decent number of data types that we don't have to care about. The next section explores these:

Figure 7.2: The contents of a glTF file

Now that you have an idea of what is stored in a glTF file, the following section will explore the parts of the file format needed for skinned animation.

The parts you need for animation

When using glTF files to...