Animation programming

by Sami AMARA and William NARDONE

Running the project

Launching Release/AnimationProgramming.exe will run the project. Alternatively, you can open the solution (AnimationProgramming.sln) and press F5. Finally, you can :

1. Open the solution (AnimationProgramming.sln)
2. In the solution explorer, left click "AnimationProgramming" under "Solution 'AnimationProgramming'"
3. Click "Build"
4. Wait for the generation to be over
5. Launch Release/AnimationProgramming.exe

Release/AnimationProgramming.exe will sometimes close shortly after being launched. The model may also not appear sometimes. The same goes with the Local Windows Debugger in Visual Studio. Some errors may be displayed in the console, or in the editor, but these problems comes from the underlying engine. Check the screenshot/video folder (Docs/Screenshots) to see working examples.

What is and is not done

• Draw the skeleton with lines using DrawLine (a little in front of the character in order to see the lines) (tag skeleton_drawing)
• Move a bone manually (move_bone tag)
• Code the hardware skinning so that the vertices follow the bones (send the transformations of the bones with the SetSkinningPose function in Engine.h) (tag hardware_skinning)
• Display the first keyframe of the walk animation on the character (tag first_keyframe_pose)
• Make the character play the running animation by hard switching from keyframe to keyframe (raw_animation tag)
• [] Interpolate the keyframes so that the animation is smooth
• [] Blend the walking and running animations, controlling the game speeds of the 2 animates so that they are always synchronized (that they have the same normalized time)

The aformentioned finished versions can be checkout out with git checkout <tag>. The final version is tagged GOLD.

Architecture

• AnimationProgramming/ contains sources and Visual Studio's solution explorer files
• AnimationProgramming/Math/ has all the sources for the math used throughout this project
• AnimationProgramming/Animation/ has all animation related sources added to the original project
• Docs/ contains screenshots, videos, and the architecture illustrated
• Release/ holds the binary contents and data used in the project

You can find this picture in Docs/