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)

Chapter 2: Implementing Vectors

In this chapter, you will learn the basics of vector math. Much of what you will code throughout the rest of this book relies on having a strong understanding of vectors. Vectors will be used to represent displacement and direction.

By the end of this chapter, you will have implemented a robust vector library and will be able to perform a variety of vector operations, including component-wise and non-component-wise operations.

We will cover the following topics in this chapter:

  • Introducing vectors
  • Creating a vector
  • Understanding component-wise operations
  • Understanding non-component-wise operations
  • Interpolating vectors
  • Comparing vectors
  • Exploring more vectors

    Important information:

    In this chapter, you will learn how to implement vectors in an intuitive, visual way that relies on code more than math formulas. If you are interested in math formulas or want some interactive examples to try out, go to https://gabormakesgames...