Book Image

C++ Game Animation Programming - Second Edition

By : Michael Dunsky, Gabor Szauer
4.5 (2)
Book Image

C++ Game Animation Programming - Second Edition

4.5 (2)
By: Michael Dunsky, Gabor Szauer

Overview of this book

If you‘re fascinated by the complexities of animating video game characters and are curious about the transformation of model files into 3D avatars and NPCs that can explore virtual worlds, then this book is for you. In this new edition, you’ll learn everything you need to know about game animation, from a simple graphical window to a large crowd of smoothly animated characters. First, you’ll learn how to use modern high-performance graphics, dig into the details of how virtual characters are stored, and load the models and animations into a minimalistic game-like application. Then, you’ll get an overview of the components of an animation system, how to play the animations and combine them, and how to blend from one animation into another. You’ll also get an introduction to topics that will make your programming life easier, such as debugging your code or stripping down the graphical output. By the end of this book, you’ll have gained deep insights into all the parts of game animation programming and how they work together, revealing the magic that brings life to the virtual worlds on your screen.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
1
Part 1:Building a Graphics Renderer
7
Part 2: Mathematics Roundup
10
Part 3: Working with Models and Animations
15
Part 4: Advancing Your Code to the Next Level

Practical sessions

Here are some ideas if you want to get a deeper insight into quaternions and splines:

  • Join multiple Hermite splines in the 06_opengl_spline_quat and/or 12_vulkan_spline_quat examples to create a bigger spline and interpolate the moving box from the last example code along all of the splines. To continuously join two Hermite splines, the end vertex of the first spline needs to be the starting vertex of the second spline, and the output tangent of the first spline needs to be the input tangent of the second spline. Switching between the different splines may be a bit tricky though.
  • Enhanced difficulty level: Assign different lengths of the overall interpolation range to the splines. This leads to different movement speeds of the box on the splines. One spline may take, say, 80% of the interpolation range, resulting in a slow-moving box along the path, while the others share the remaining 20%, and the box will move much faster along the path.
  • Add some...