Preface

Modern game animation is a bit of a black art. There are not many resources available that detail how to build a track-driven animation system, or advanced topics such as dual quaternion skinning. That is the void this book aims to fill. The goal of this book is to shed some light on the black art of animation programming and make the topic approachable for everyone.

This book takes a "theory to implementation" approach, where you will learn the theory of each topic discussed first. Once you understand the theory, you will implement it to get hands-on experience.

This book makes it a point to focus on the concepts and implementation details of animation programming, not the language or graphics API being used. By focusing on these fundamental concepts, you will be able to implement an animation system regardless of language or graphics API.