Advanced Animation with DirectX (Premier Press Game Development) [Illustrated] [Paperback]

Jim Adams (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1592000371 | ISBN-13: 978-1592000371 | Publication Date: May 22, 2003 | Edition: 1

You've tackled the basics. You can blend textures and manipulate vertex buffers with the best of them. So what now? "Advanced Animation with DirectX" will show you how to move beyond the basics and into the amazing world of advanced animation techniques. Get ready to jump right in, because this book starts off with a bang. There is no time wasted on basic concepts that you've already mastered. Instead, you'll learn the techniques you need to create seamless timing, skeletal animations, and cloth simulations. Don't let the pros have all the fun! With "Advanced Animation with DirectX" by your side, you'll learn how to use cutting-edge animation techniques, from real-time cloth simulations and lip-synced facial animation to animated textures and a physics-based rag-doll animation system. If you're bored with the basics and ready to get down to the nitty-gritty of truly spectacular animation with DirectX, you've come to the right place.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Jim Adams has been programming since age nine. For the past 22 years, he has worked various jobs in the business and entertainment industry. He stays active in the game programming community by writing technical articles and moderating a message forum on www.gamedev.net. He has contributed to several books on game development and maintains a core library of DirectX functions to assist in game development. Jim is the author of the book "Programming Role Playing Game with DirectX" (Premier Press, 1931841098) and "Advanced Animation with DirectX" (Premier Press, 1592000371).

Product Details

• Paperback: 480 pages
• Publisher: Course Technology PTR; 1 edition (May 22, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1592000371
• ISBN-13: 978-1592000371
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 7.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,760,180 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #44 in Books > Computers & Technology > Programming > Graphics & Multimedia > DirectX

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Out of date, February 27, 2009

By 

J. S. Harbour (Arizona) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Advanced Animation with DirectX (Premier Press Game Development) (Paperback)

The timing of this book's release is unfortunate because Microsoft made huge changes to DirectX 9 during 2004. As a result, the code in this book is completely obsolete today.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not a great book, October 18, 2005

By 

R. Ahmed (Bellevue,Wa USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Advanced Animation with DirectX (Premier Press Game Development) (Paperback)

I would only suggest this book if you have a lot of patience and determination to make sense of the authors code. The source code has bugs, and many many memory leaks. It isn't even formatted correctly. In order to make sense of it, I had to tab and format it correctly. Not fun. There are much easier ways to do animation than what the book describes. If you really want to know how X files work then get this book, otherwise skip it.

6 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent book on Character Animation in DirectX9, August 29, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Advanced Animation with DirectX (Premier Press Game Development) (Paperback)

This is the best book, to my opinion, in the game development series, and probably the best character animation book on DirectX (the secondary best is the Programming Role Playing Game with Directx8). The first and the most important good thing on this book is that it concentrates on the advanced character animation techniques in DirectX9 rather than wasting half of the book talking about some basic things such as windows programming, DirectX and even C++. The book is only 500 pages, but containing lots of useful information and more importantly with decent working demo using D3DX library in DirectX9, not like most of the character animation books in the market, repeating lots of theory, and then with trivial, not re-useable code.

The contents of the books are excellent in terms of smooth blending of theory and programming practice using DirectX, especially parts concerning timing of animation, skeletal animation, real time animation blending, and even the physical simulation of rigid body animation. This book also presents other animation techniques such as facial animation and particle animation.

It will be useful if the book could talk about incorporation of simple forward/inverse kinematics techniques for the character to achieve the "object grasping" scenario, which should not be too far away from the level that the book has reached, as good materials have been presented on how to control and update the transformation matrices of hierarchical skeletal-based character animation.

In a word, this is an excellent book for anybody will like to know the techniques for character animation in DirectX.