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)

Multiplying quaternions

Two quaternions can be concatenated by multiplying them together. Like with matrices, the operation is carried out from right to left; the right quaternion's rotation is applied first and then the left quaternion's.

Assume you have two quaternions, q and p. They are subscripted with 0, 1, 2, and 3, which correspond to the X, Y, Z, and W components, respectively. These quaternions can be expressed in ijk notation, as shown:

To multiply these two quaternions together, distribute the components of p to the components of q. Distributing the real component is simple. Distributing p3 to q would look like this:

Distributing the imaginary components looks very similar. The real and imaginary parts are combined separately; the order of imaginary components matters. For example, distributing poi to q would look like this:

Fully distributing p to q looks like this:

Start simplifying for the case when imaginary numbers...