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)

Exploring how glTF files are stored

glTF files are stored as either plain text JSON files or in a more compact binary representation. The plain text variant commonly has a .gltf extension, while the binary variant commonly has a .glb extension.

There might be multiple files. A glTF file can choose to embed large chunks of binary data—even textures—or it can choose to store them in external files. This is reflected in the following screenshot of Blender3D's glTF export options:

Figure 7.1: Blender3D's glTF export options

Sample files provided with the downloadable content for this book are stored as glTF embedded files (.gltf). This is the plain text variant of glTF that can be inspected with any text editor. More importantly, it's a single file to keep track of. Even though the files provided with this book are in the glTF embedded format, the final code will support loading the binary format and separate files (.bin) as well...