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)

glTF – loading a skeleton

We need to implement one more loading function—the LoadSkeleton function. This is a convenience function that loads a skeleton without having to call three separate functions.

Implement the LoadSkeleton function in GLTFLoader.cpp. Don't forget to add the function declaration to GLTFLoader.h. The function returns a new skeleton by calling the existing LoadPose, LoadBindPose, and LoadJointNames functions:

Skeleton LoadSkeleton(cgltf_data* data) {
    return Skeleton(
        LoadRestPose(data),
        LoadBindPose(data),
        LoadJointNames(data)
    );
}

The LoadSkeleton function is just a helper function that allows you to initialize a skeleton with a single function call. In the next section, you will implement a Mesh class, which will let you display animated meshes...