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)

Working with shaders

The most important part of the abstraction layer is the Shader class. To draw something, you must bind a shader and attach some attributes and uniforms to it. The shader describes how the thing being drawn should be transformed and shaded, while attributes define what is being drawn.

In this section, you will implement a Shader class that can compile vertex and fragment shaders. The Shader class will also return uniform and attribute indices.

The Shader class declaration

When implementing the Shader class, you will need to declare several protected helper functions. These functions will keep the public API of the class clean; they are used for things such as reading a file into a string or calling an OpenGL code to compile the shader:

  1. Create a new file to declare the Shader class in; call it Shader.h. The Shader class should have a handle to the OpenGL shader object and maps for attribute and uniform indices. These dictionaries have a string for...