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 per-instance data

When rendering a large crowd, each actor in the crowd has certain properties. In this section, you will explore what that per-instance data is and how to pass it to the shader. This will greatly reduce the amount of data that is uploaded to the GPU as uniform arrays every frame.

Moving the skinning pipeline to a vertex shader does not completely remove needing to pass crowd-related uniform to the shader. Every actor in a crowd will need some data uploaded to the GPU. The per-instance data is much smaller than what would be uploaded if pose palette matrices were being used.

Each actor in the crowd will need a position, rotation, and scale to build a model matrix. Actors will need to know the current frame to sample and the time between the current and next frames to blend.

The total size of each actor's instance data is 11 floats and 2 integers. That's only 52 bytes per instance. Per-instance data will always be passed using uniform arrays...