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 6: Building an Abstract Renderer

This book focuses on animation, not rendering. However, rendering an animated model is important. In order to avoid getting caught up in any specific graphics APIs, in this chapter, you will build an abstraction layer on top of OpenGL. This will be a thin abstraction layer, but it will let you work on your animation in later chapters without having to do anything OpenGL-specific.

The abstract renderer you will implement in this chapter is very lightweight. It doesn't have a lot of features, only the ones you need to display animated models. This should make porting the renderer to other APIs straightforward.

By the end of this chapter, you should be able to render some debug geometry to the window using the abstract rendering code you will create. On a higher level, you will learn the following:

  • How to create shaders
  • How to store mesh data in buffers
  • How to bind those buffers as shader attributes
  • How to send uniform...