Advanced Animation with DirectX by Jim Adams
Published May 2003
List Price: $39.99, Your Amazon.com Price: $29.59
Course Technology PTR Price: $31.99
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Amazon Sales Rank: 297,375
Summary 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.
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 Bottom Line: The book's is very implementation orientated and the code are outdated, therefore it's best to stay away from this book to avoid frustrations.
If you looking for a Direct3D reference to animation, this is it. This book contains what I was hoping his last book went into more, and I could not be more happy to have bought it.
Mr. Adams stays right to the point giving fact after fact. I am still going through the book, but I have not run across any drawn out stories that usually litter non-math oriented books.
A really great book that covers lots of usefull tech. It dosen't contain any of that annoying introduction to Direct X and Win32 chapters. Some of the techniques described arn't necissalry advanced (skinned meshes for instance) and he's a bit to found of the DirectX file format that sometimes gets in the way of teaching out the techniques. In total a great book, one of the best, if not the best book published by Premier Press.
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