Hands-On C++ Game Animation Programming

Chapter 10: Mesh Skinning

Deforming a mesh to match an animated pose is called skinning. In order to implement skinning, you first need to declare a mesh class. Once you have declared a mesh class, it can be deformed using a shader (GPU skinning) or just with C++ code (CPU skinning). Both of these skinning methods are covered in this chapter. By the end of this chapter, you should be able to do the following:

• Understand how a skinned mesh is different from a non-skinned mesh
• Understand the entire skinning pipeline
• Implement a skeleton class
• Load the bind pose of a skeleton from a glTF file
• Implement a skinned mesh class
• Load skinned meshes from a gLTF file
• Implement CPU skinning
• Implement GPU skinning

Exploring meshes

A mesh is made up of ...