   Wanted: Skeletal animation theory and practice book recommendations
  Hello!I want to program my own skeletal animation system and I plan to buy some books about this topic.I want to learn about different mesh modification strategies, inverse kinematics and efficient implementation (+ all that you think is necessary :) ) Do you have any recommendations for me? Any web resources should also be very useful!/Per   
  Well for me this page was really helpfulhttp://www.cyberkreations.com/kreationsedge/?page_id=29From there you should be able to learn all necessary stuff about matrix magic. But its only basic principle and before you move into skeletal animations you should learn more about GLSL or similar GPU language. If you want to achieve good fps you should use GPU skinning.You should also consider file format because exporting/importing skeleton with weights is not fun at all.A lot of formats exports animation matrices with animation set for bones. Matrices are good for you when you want to imagine how it works but for practical use you should convert them into quaternion because of SLERP (faster interpolation) and speed (you are sending quat and translation -> 4+3 instead of  matrix -> 16 into shader)   ;  "If you want to achieve good fps you should use GPU skinning."Thats not necesarily true.  If you are already GPU bound you should do bone and vertex transformations of the CPU.Maybe nitpicking but just wanted to point that out.BTW that link is neat (:   ;  Thanks for that great link!I remember there was a simple example of GPU vertex blending in the OpenGL Superbible, but I'll probably start with a software solution and use the profiler to optimize.I also found a book "Theory of Applied Robotics: Kinematics, Dynamics, and Control" which seems to deal with a part of the problem but I am not sure.   ;  I also found this book:* Character Animation With Direct3D, Carl GranbergThis seems to be good on the surface and got 2 positive reviews on Amazon. Has anyone here read this and can recommend it?   ;  Hello pernyblom,You got me remember my old days when I had started to implement my skeletal animation library. I had a quite long talk with the author of "Animadead" Skeletal Animation Library. He helped me a lot by answering my silly questions.Although I created a simple skeletal pose library, I just could not more time find to implement animation system.Yes, books may help you adding reference knowledge, but I suggest you start by studying open source animation libraries like Animadead, Cal3D. This will certainly help you planning your own animation system.For mesh modification (I hope you are referring to the mesh deformation issues which need to be accurate in the extreme animation poses like bending), check out Dual Quaternion Skinninng (GPU only). Search online for Dual Quaternion Skinning.Also, if possible, implement importer for BVH motion files, which will simplify animation process.Not books, but some links I referred:http://www.k-3d.org/wiki/Skeletal_Animationhttp://www.3dkingdoms.com/weekly/weekly.php?cat=3http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=505187&whichpage=1�http://www.gamedev.net/reference/programming/features/xfilepc/I am still working on my character animation system. Currently, I have just focused myself on toon rendering module.Hope this helpsGood Luck.   ;  Thanks a lot bytelogic!   