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)

Preface

Modern game animation is a bit of a black art. There are not many resources available that detail how to build a track-driven animation system, or advanced topics such as dual quaternion skinning. That is the void this book aims to fill. The goal of this book is to shed some light on the black art of animation programming and make the topic approachable for everyone.

This book takes a "theory to implementation" approach, where you will learn the theory of each topic discussed first. Once you understand the theory, you will implement it to get hands-on experience.

This book makes it a point to focus on the concepts and implementation details of animation programming, not the language or graphics API being used. By focusing on these fundamental concepts, you will be able to implement an animation system regardless of language or graphics API.