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)

Summary

In this chapter, you learned how to implement a transformation as a discreet structure that contains a position, rotation, and scale. In many ways, the Transform class holds the same data that you would normally store in a matrix.

You learned how to combine, invert, and mix between transforms, as well as how to use transforms to move points and rotate vectors. Transforms are going to be essential moving forward, as they are used to animate the armature or skeleton of game models.

The reason you need an explicit Transform struct is that matrices don't interpolate well. Interpolating transforms is very important for animation. It's how you create in-between poses to display two given keyframes.

In the next chapter, you will learn how to write a light abstraction layer on top of OpenGL to make rendering in future chapters easier.