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Best resources to use/learn skeletal animation and inverse kinematics.

General and Gameplay Programming Programming

Started by VanillaSnake21 October 03, 2020 05:25 AM

3 comments, last by VanillaSnake21 3 years, 9 months ago

VanillaSnake21

211

Author

October 03, 2020 05:25 AM

I would like to add skeletal animation to my framework and am currently reading Physics Based Animation in order to get myself acclimated to the area, however, it's pretty dense material and the book while pretty straight forward doesn't do much explaining beyond crunching out algorithms.

I could probably take some time and implement this just from that book alone, but there is really a lot to learn for me. From the funky Denavit-Hartenberg notion to Jacobian transformations, which are completely new to me. I'd have to dust off my old MV Calculus books and spend a few weeks examining/implementing everything just to get up and running. So I was wondering if there was an easier approach?

So far I've also seen Game Engine Architecture (rev.3) recommended as a good intro book on the subject but after skimming over the IK chapter (shouldn't even call it a chapter, it's more of a subsection within a skeletal animation chapter) and it doesn't even go into half as much detail as my Physics Based Animation book. It just briefly explains what IK is in about a page length.

So are there any other resources I could use to help me supplement this book or is it one of those areas that I really have to spend my time with? I'm also contemplating of maybe even using an existing library (not too keen on this but I will consider it if the material is just too time consuming to understand/implement), however all I could find was ozz-animation on github which I will take a look at, but are there no mainstream libraries that handle this?

Thanks.

You didn't come into this world. You came out of it, like a wave from the ocean. You are not a stranger here. -Alan Watts

ddlox

309

October 03, 2020 09:58 AM

if u really don't want to use and learn from an existing physics library (free or commercial lib) and if you really find that your current books are too hard to follow then try searching for “Physics for game developers” on Amazon's website , you'll probably find a richer book selection there… but whichever the case be ready to crunch some maths and algos. Start small, code, test (loadz), try and grow it… it will take some time so take breaks ?

Dirk Gregorius

2,918

October 03, 2020 04:21 PM

A good start is Maurizio' presentation here:

I also found Steve Rotenberg's animation course an amazing initial resource:

https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/classes/wi20/cse169-a/sessions.html

The animation chapter in Game Engine Architecture which you already pointed out is also among the best resources on this topic.

You can search the GameDev forum for posts from RobTheBloke. He was a developer on Morpheme and posted a lot of good stuff here.

Finally, you can of course check out Unreal and Lumberyard for their animation systems. The latter (called MotionFX) is pretty isolated as a library (or gem as Az calls it) and can be found here:

https://github.com/aws/lumberyard/tree/master/dev/Gems/EMotionFX

Unfortunately a lot of the other articles and books are rather useless in my opinion. They either describe the DirectX animation system or are very academic and basically just copy each other. Both are overly complicated and useless in my opinion.

For learning physics I recommend starting from Box2D Lite here:

https://github.com/erincatto/box2d-lite

and study all his presentations from the recent years at GDC here:

https://box2d.org/publications/

This should be plenty to study. Good luck! ?

VanillaSnake21

211

Author

October 04, 2020 03:09 AM

Thanks! Lots of great resources that I wasn't aware of. Rotenberg's class especially - looks very on point.

I actually forgot that Unreal has all of its source on GitHub and that they have a top of the art animation system in place already. So downloading it as we speak and will definitely be looking at it in detail.

Unfortunately couldn't find too many relevant posts by RobTheBloke, GameDev forum search is useless and doing a google search with site:gamedev.net “RobTheBloke” returns a lot off topic posts etc. So it'll take me some time to sift through that.

So thanks for the boost!

You didn't come into this world. You came out of it, like a wave from the ocean. You are not a stranger here. -Alan Watts

Dirk Gregorius

2,918

October 04, 2020 04:27 PM

I forgot Ozz animation library. This one has lots of useful stuff as well:

http://guillaumeblanc.github.io/ozz-animation/