Skeletal Animation...

Does anyone out there know of a good place to look for a tutorial (or good information) on skeletal animation using OpenGL?

I have already looked at the code from Jeff Landers from his articles in Game Developers magazine and with all of the MFC that he used I am at a loss as to what is going on most of the time. I am looking for something a bit more descriptive than dissecting someone else’s code.

Thank You,
Jason

I wrote a simple GLUT demo a while back that illustrates vertex weighting in OpenGL. You could probably extend the program to handle more than one joint and bone and to read in a mesh from a data file.

Hopefully the following link will work:
http://www.nvidia.com/Marketing/Developer/DevRel.nsf/pages/724427061689EA72882568F6007FAC3D

If not, go to our devrel page, Demos & Effects, “OpenGL GL_EXT_vertex_weighting extension demo”.

Hope you find it useful,

  • Matt

Rob Heubner put up this bunch of info, which, while not a tutorial, has a heap of good info in it.
http://www.nihilistic.com/GDC2000/gdc2000lecture/index.htm

These links look promising: http://www.darwin3d.com/gdm1999.htm#gdm1099 http://www.darwin3d.com/gdm1998.htm#3DIKSTUFF http://www.darwin3d.com/gdm1998.htm#gdm0998 http://www.darwin3d.com/gdm1998.htm#gdm0598

Thanks a lot Relic for your numerous links
Thanks to mcraighead too.
(even if I won’t use proprietary extensions)

Yes, thank you all for the input. I will check these links out today and see what they can do for me.

Thank You,
Jason