Customer Reviews

Advanced Animation with DirectX (Premier Press Game Development)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

There are new helper functions in the D3DX library that eliminates parsing X files manually. Parsing X files is not really related to the book's topic, and yet you are forced to learn it because it's used throughout the book. Even worse is the fact that the code for parsing X files, which the book's examples are tightly coupled with, are no longer working with the newer releases of the DX9 SDK. So unless you go back to an older SDK release, none of the book's samples will compile. Even if you do use an older SDK, you will be wasting time learning functions and interfaces that have been deprecated. Bottom Line: The book's is very implementation orientated and the code are outdated, therefore it's best to stay away from this book to avoid frustrations.

First of all the retail price of the book is too much. The last section (video on texture and cloth simulation) which he thinks are the most advanced are just pretty lame. He could have better described how to export a skinned mesh better. The ragdoll effect as given is not combined with an animated model making it a bit less useful. The book does cover a lot on using skeletal animation that was definately not covered in other books that I've bought on the subject. I'm also glad that it has no intro to DX section. PS: Who wrote the 5 star review, the author?

I buy this book because I can not find another book whit animation on direct x, but you need install the direct x sdk 9 to run the examples, and a good video card, if you not, show you many error of memory, in some cases this book are helpfully if you not have any idea how to made an animation or cloth simulation, I recommend this book for a start into direct animation, the book only help you to take a path to start into game develop, because are very hard to find a book how to show you made animations, there is many things and ideas you can save from this book to use like a guide for a start.

Advanced Animation with DirectX is not a good book at all. The author did a terrible job on the skinned animation parts and the later parts of the book is just plain bad. The beginning was ok but the code was not right. I tried to implement some of the stuff at the beginning and it didn't work. When I sat down and thought about the problem at hand and how to do it, I got everything working smoothly without using anything that was done is the book (which means the book was a waste of money). Who ever gave this book 5 out of 5 stars must be the author or a friend.