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 how to blend multiple animations. Blended animations can blend the whole hierarchy or just a subset. You also built a system to manage the fading between animations when a new animation plays. We also covered additive animations, which can be used to create a new motion when given the joint angles to interpolate between.

There are four samples included in the downloadable materials for this chapter. Sample00 is all the code up to this point in the book. Sample01 demonstrates how to use the Blend function by blending between a walk and a run animation on a timer. Sample02 demonstrates the use of the cross-fade controller by crossfading to random animations and Sample03 demonstrates how to use additive animation blending.

In the next chapter, you will learn about inverse kinematics. Inverse kinematics allows you to figure out how the limb of a character should be bent according to where its ends are. Think about pinning the foot of a character...