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)

Summary

In this chapter, you learned what glTF files are, what parts of the glTF format are useful for skinned animation, and how to use cglTF to load a glTF file. Don't worry if the format is still a bit confusing; it will make more sense as you start to parse various bits of data from cgltf files. Using cgltf will let you focus on converting glTF data into useful runtime structures without having to worry about manually parsing JSON files. In the next chapter, you will start implementing the building blocks of animation by implementing curves, frames, and tracks.