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)

What is a matrix?

A matrix is a two-dimensional array of numbers. A square matrix is one whose width and height are the same. In this chapter, you will implement a 4 x 4 matrix; that is, a matrix with four rows and four columns. The elements of this matrix will be stored as a linear array.

A 4 x 4 matrix can be thought of as four vectors that have four components each, or an array of vec4s. If the vectors represent the columns of the matrix, the matrix is column-major. If the vectors represent the rows of the matrix, it is row-major.

Assuming a 4 x 4 matrix contains the letters A, B, C, D … P of the alphabet, it can be constructed as either a row- or column-major matrix. This is demonstrated in the following Figure 3.1:

Figure 3.1: Comparing row- and column-major matrices

Most math books and OpenGL use column-major matrices. In this chapter, you will be implementing column-major matrices as well. Understanding what is in a matrix is important....