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)

Creating an animation texture

In this section, you will implement all the code needed to work with floating-point textures in a AnimTexture class. Each AnimTexture object will contain a 32-bit floating point RGBA texture. There will be two copies of this data: one on the CPU and one uploaded to the GPU.

The CPU buffer is kept around to easily modify the contents of the texture in bulk before saving it to disk, or uploading it to OpenGL. It keeps the API simple at the cost of some additional memory.

There is no standard 32-bit texture format, so saving and writing to disk will simply dump the binary contents of the AnimTexture class to disk. In the next section, you will begin to implement the AnimTexture class. This class will provide an easy-to-use interface for implementing 32-bit floating-point textures.

Declaring the AnimTexture class

Animation textures are assumed to always be square; the width and height don't need to be tracked separately. It should be enough...