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Carl Granberg

Character Animation With Direct3D Paperback – April 23, 2009

by Carl Granberg (Author)

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Do you want to learn how to make your game characters look and move more realistically? Character Animation with Direct3D shows you how to apply fundamental character animation techniques to Direct3D technology to bring your characters to life. Beginning with a brief history of character animation, you�ll be introduced to the most common types of character animation.This book covers skeletal animation, morphing, inverse kinematics, ragdoll animation, and much more. You�ll start with a basic 3D character that you�ll bring to life as you work your way through each chapter. Throughout the course of the book you�ll learn how to create a character that can walk, talk, collide with objects, fall, and more.You�ll utilize skeletal animation for overall movement and morphing animation techniques for more refined movement such as changes in facial expression. You can apply the character animation skills you learn in this book to any game genre. Character Animation with Direct3D is perfect for any game developer looking to create more life-like and interesting game characters.

Print length

304 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Charles River Media
Publication date

April 23, 2009
Dimensions

7.5 x 0.75 x 9.25 inches
ISBN-10

1584505702
ISBN-13

978-1584505709
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Carl Granberg has been creating games on a hobby basis since the old DOS-based Mode 13h graphics, after which he moved on to DirectDraw and finally Direct3D graphics. He received his master of science in computing at Curtin University, Perth, Australia, and has since been working in the Finnish game industry for 3 years. He is currently working as a Tools programmer at Remedy Entertainment in Finland. He�s also involved with a group of hobby game developers that goes by the name of BugFactory (www.bugfactory.fi), which has just released its first title, The Tales of Bingwood. For matters relating to this book, he can be contacted at carl@bugfactory.fi.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Charles River Media; 1st edition (April 23, 2009)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 304 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1584505702
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1584505709
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.95 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.5 x 0.75 x 9.25 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #5,306,313 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #63 in DirectX Software Programming
- #675 in Digital Audio Production
- #1,810 in Digital Video Production (Books)

Customer Reviews:
7 ratings

About the author

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Carl Granberg

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Hello people,

If you're reading this message then I'm already dead and you are the last survivors of a cataclysmic event of unimaginable proportions...

Too bad that makes my books more or less useless… Well, not quite I guess. You could always light a fire with them or use them as insulation during the coming fallout winters. What do I care? I’m already dead...

Alright... All jokes aside. If you’ve found this page then I guess that you are more or less like me… A nerd. Don’t feel bad though (at least not for very long). There will come a time when the nerds will rule the earth (see ‘Daemon’ & ‘Freedom™’ by Daniel Suarez). While you’re waiting for that glorious day, you might as well enjoy some light reading.

If you want to start off with some good and proper Game Development, I’d recommend you start with Frank Luna’s ‘Introduction to 3D Game Programming’ comes both for DX9 & 10.

After you’re comfortable with the basics I’d highly recommend the earlier books in the ‘Game Programming Gems’ series. The later ones are ok too, but the best stuff is in the early books (in my own humble opinion). These books will prove invaluable to you as reference material years after you’ve bought them.

Then if you feel so inclined do try out my books as well. They are a bit of the ‘skip-the-meat-and-go-straight-for-the-pudding’ variety. I usually try to keep the ‘theoretic’ parts (read boring) as light as possible and cover the stuff that you might actually care about. If I were you I’d read the RTS book before the animation book. Even though the RTS book is a bit dated, there’s still a lot of core concepts covered in that book that you’ve have a lot of use for during you game development projects. You probably won’t have any use of the sound or the networking part of that book though since the API’s have changed so much since the book was written. People have been bugging me to make an updated second edition of that one... But again, I’ll rather skip to the pudding as well and write something new instead.

You can find out some more about the books at www.cjgraphic.com, you can also reach me at carl(at)cjgraphic(dot)com should you want to.

As usual this message will self destruct in 5… 4… 3… 2… 1…

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Top reviews from the United States

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C. Moeller

Another very good game programming hit!

Reviewed in the United States on July 3, 2009

Verified Purchase

I ordered this book soon after finishing Carl Granberg's last book. The previous book delves into many helpful techniques regarding programming a game from scratch, and many different ways of doing it well.

The new book focuses on character animation, but also does it with an iterative approach, making it relatively easy to pick apart the program and figure out how everything works.

If more game programming books were like this there would have many more experienced programmers out there! The book goes through a new, separate example for each technique and covers many aspects of animation as well as many related topics.

Examples are skinned meshes, skeletal animation, physics animation (leading to) ragdoll simulation, facial animation/lip sync, mapping characters, crowd simulation, decals on characters(bullet holes,ect), and adding/animating hair!

Carl's style is much easier to learn from than several other authors combined, and many of the techniques will help you out even if you are not ready for character animation yet.

With this book and the previous book combined, and some knowledge of C++, you have enough resources to write your own game of almost any genre.

8 people found this helpful

Helpful

William McColl

Four Stars

Reviewed in the United States on April 7, 2015

great book

Bad approach to the subjet

Reviewed in the United States on March 31, 2013

Verified Purchase

I was disappointed by this book mostly because of the approach. It is about character animation all in the context of a deprecated DirectX API. The fact is even acknowledged by the author at the beginning of the book. I wish there had been a Look inside when i bought it.

Helpful

Andrew Malar

character animation with d3d review

Reviewed in the United States on June 13, 2010

Verified Purchase

this book is pretty good for what it is...

it does teach "character" animation...

it does not however go into a plural very much...

meaning that for the most part it only hints
toward how you would begin to try and create multiple animated characters
at the same time. but it is a good book nevertheless

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Mike Garcia

Excellent and direct to the point!

Reviewed in the United States on January 9, 2014

Not much filler in this book.. it's all work!
Except for the 3D animation industry chapter.. it felt like a good break :)

The book is very condensed, if your a newbie 3D programmer like me you'll be re-reading paragraphs while following the code.
Which is a great way to learn! :D

Don't let it's age and Direct3D fool you, the techniques covered here are very much relevant (shaders, texture mapping etc) and can be applied to openGL and game engines.

Read half of it, only reading the chapters which I need, so the layout is good.
The Author's site has updated code which work great.

Looking at getting his RTS book also.

I would give it 5/5 if it had a bit more 3D newbie explanations, the newbie parts feel a bit short for me.

Looking at creating my first game, and this is a great resource.

My dev blog is here:
[...]

2 people found this helpful

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

BookWorm v CodeMonkey

Good introduction !

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 30, 2013

Verified Purchase

Worked examples, samples and easy to follow, if you have some knowledge of Direct X, you'll be away in no time :)

One person found this helpful

KIYOUNG MOON

Need better title.

Reviewed in Canada on February 3, 2011

Verified Purchase

I bought this book for 3d character animation(Because of title!)
It is a quite good book. Organization of chapters, well describe and lots of fun projects.
but this book has wrong title. For 3d animation, it is not a good book because author used x file format which is microsoft support and it is not good for beginner because _
beginner need to understand, know how animation works well.

Well, if you wanna use microsoft's stuffs (D3DX and x file formats and so on) and pretty happy with that, it is a good book.

I expected that author describe 'how to make a max/maya exporter', 'export mesh and animation data' and 'reading mesh and animation data and draw it' There is nothing about these. Because x file format does everything for you! (If you just want to make a game without those, it will be ok)

Last, let's talk about others.
I really liked other chapters and author described well. Lots of other books described same things but pretty hard to understand but this guy know how to describe and made a working projects.
Also provided all executable files in the CD so you can see the result before you start reading.

Even though I missed character animation stuffs but there are more fun projects and it was very fun. If you don't mind about 3d character animation stuffs and like to see other fun projects too, this book might be good.
I read 'Advanced animation with DirectX' and 'Game Engine Architecture' I think 'Game Engine Architecture' described how animation works better than other books.

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