Hands-On Game Animation Programming

Learn animation programming from first principles and implement modern animation techniques that can be integrated into any game development workflow

Key Features

• Build a functional and production-ready modern animation system with complete features using C++
• Learn basic, advanced, and skinned animation programming with this step-by-step guide
• Discover the math required to implement cutting edge animation techniques such as inverse kinematics and dual quaternions

Book Description

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.

What you will learn

• Get the hang of 3D vectors, matrices, and transforms, and their use in game development
• Discover various techniques to smoothly blend animations
• Get to grips with GLTF file format and its design decisions and data structures
• Design an animation system by using animation tracks and implementing skinning
• Optimize various aspects of animation systems such as skinned meshes, clip sampling, and pose palettes
• Implement the IK technique for your game characters using CCD and FABRIK solvers
• Understand dual quaternion skinning and how to render large instanced crowds

Who this book is for

This book is for professional, independent, and hobbyist developers interested in building a robust animation system from the ground up. Some knowledge of the C++ programming language will be helpful.

Table of Contents

1. Creating a Game Window
2. Implementing Vectors
3. Implementing Matrices
4. Implementing Quaternions
5. Implementing Transforms
6. Building an Abstract Renderer
7. Exploring the glTF File Format
8. Creating Curves, Frames, and Tracks
9. Implementing Animation Clips
10. Mesh Skinning
11. Optimizing the Animation Pipeline
12. Blending between Animations
13. Implementing Inverse Kinematics
14. Using Dual Quaternions for Skinning
15. Rendering Instanced Crowds

Gabor Szauer has been making games since 2010. He graduated from Full Sail University in 2010 with a bachelor's degree in game development. Gabor maintains an active Twitter presence, @gszauer, and maintains a programming-oriented game development blog. Gabor's previously published books are Game Physics Programming Cookbook and Lua Quick Start Guide, both published by Packt.