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)

Storing data in textures

Sampling animations is not a trivial task. There are a lot of loops and functions, which makes animation sampling on the GPU a difficult problem. One way to address this problem is to simplify it.

Instead of sampling an animation in real-time, it could be sampled at set time intervals. The process of sampling an animation at set intervals and writing the resulting data to a file is called baking.

Once the animation data is baked, the shader no longer has to sample an actual animation clip. Instead, it can look up the nearest sampled pose based on time. So, where does this animation data get baked to? Animation can be baked into textures. Textures can be used as data buffers, and there is already an easy way to read texture data in shaders.

Normally, the storage type and information in a texture is abstracted away by the sampling function in the shader. For example, the texture2D function in GLSL takes normalized uv coordinates as an argument and...