skeletal animation math

Math and Physics Programming

Started by Hannesnisula May 18, 2009 07:03 AM

2 comments, last by RobTheBloke 14 years, 11 months ago

1,126

Author

May 18, 2009 07:03 AM

I want to know the math behind skeletal animation to create my own animation system and ragdolls. I know it's matrices but i.e. I don't know how to calculate a matrix to move from 1 animation to another, for smooth transitions. Any book or tutorial that would explain this?

chronozphere

144

May 18, 2009 07:38 AM

Do you use quaternions to describe joint rotation?

I might be wrong on this, but It might be easier to interpolate quaternions and turn them into matrices as soon as you need those. As far as i know, this is how skeletal animation is generally implemented.

Maybe this will be usefull:

http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=474656

Hannesnisula

1,126

Author

May 18, 2009 09:21 AM

Thanks for your reply!

The article referred to in that thread seems very interesting and could probably help me with my problem.

RobTheBloke

2,553

May 19, 2009 11:25 AM

This might get you started. Keep everything as Pos+Quats for as long as possible (i.e. you can't blend matrices unless you convert them back to pos+quats). If you can interpolate between 2 key-frames, you can interpolate between 2 animations....