What this book covers
Chapter 1, Creating the Game Window, covers the initial steps to open a window using GLFW, a lightweight cross-platform window management library. The window will be enhanced to detect OpenGL 4.6 and Vulkan 1.1; code for handling window events such as resizing and moving will be added, followed by an introduction on using the keyboard and mouse as input devices.
Chapter 2, Building an OpenGL 4 Renderer, explains how to create a basic OpenGL 4 renderer that can display a textured quad consisting of two triangles.
Chapter 3, Building a Vulkan API Renderer, explores the creation of a renderer, similar to Chapter 2, but instead using the newer Vulkan API to display the textured quad.
Chapter 4, Working with Shaders, covers the different shaders of the graphics pipeline for OpenGL and Vulkan, the buffer types, and how to access the variables of shaders from renderer code. At the end of the chapter, the parts of a vertex and a fragment shader will be discussed.
Chapter 5, Adding Dear ImGui to Show Valuable Information, explains how to add a simple UI to both renderers to display information about the rendering process, such as the frames per second or timing of code sections. Also, checkboxes, buttons, and sliders will be added to the UI to control the rendering parameters.
Chapter 6, Understanding Vector and Matrix, is a quick recap of the data types of a vector and a matrix, their transformations, and their operations.
Chapter 7, A Primer on Quaternions and Splines, explains the advantage of quaternions over matrix operations and introduces some spline types that are used in game character animations.
Chapter 8, Loading Models in the glTF format, covers the internals of the glTF file format. glTF is an open file format, supported by many 3D content creation tools. Being able to load this format will let you view models and animations authored in many 3D creation tools in the application.
Chapter 9, The Model Skeleton and Skin, covers the internal skeleton of a model as a base for animation, plus vertex skinning to match different poses of the skeleton. Different methods to apply vertex skinning will be discussed in this chapter.
Chapter 10, About Poses, Frames, and Clips, explains the different data types required for character animation, allowing you to get from a simple model pose to a complete animation clip.
Chapter 11, Blending between Animations, shows different blending methods for animated mode. The chapter covers simple blending between a basic pose and an animation clip, cross-blending between different clips, and additive blending to mix different clips.
Chapter 12, Cleaning Up the User Interface, enhances the UI created in Chapter 4 with more
user-interactable elements, such as combo boxes and radio buttons. These controls enable the modification of animation parameters in real time. In addition, the timer values for the code sections will be visualized as graphical plots.
Chapter 13, Implementing Inverse Kinematics, explains how to use inverse kinematics to achieve an interaction between a character and its environment. The two inverse kinematics methods, Cyclic Coordinate Descent (CCD) and Forward And Backward Reaching Inverse Kinematics (FABRIK), will be explained and implemented.
Chapter 14, Creating Instanced Crowds, shows how to add more than one model to a scene, plus different ways to transfer model data to the graphics memory.
Chapter 15, Measuring Performance and Optimizing the Code, introduces methods to find bottlenecks by profiling code and using RenderDoc to analyze the graphics pipeline. It also offers ideas to move calculations from runtime to compile time and examines the importance of scaling to get meaningful results.