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)

Understanding how to use dual quaternion skinning

This section will explore how you can take the dual quaternion skinning code that you have written so far and implement it in an existing application. This code is meant to be for reference only; you do not have to follow along with it.

Using the dual quaternion-skinned shader is trivial; it would be easy to switch between skinning methods at runtime. The following steps demonstrate how the dual quaternion shader or a linear-skinned shader could be used to animate the same model.

Keep track of both the dual quaternion pose palette and inverse bind pose palette, as well as the linear blend pose palette and inverse bind pose palette. Have a look at the following code:

// For dual quaternion skinning
std::vector<DualQuaternion> mDqPosePalette;
std::vector<DualQuaternion> mDqInvBindPalette;
// For linear blend skinning
std::vector<mat4> mLbPosePalette;
std::vector<mat4> mLbInvBindPalette;

When the application...