Direct3D Rendering Cookbook

Chapter 4. Animating Meshes with Vertex Skinning

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Preparing the vertex shader and buffers for vertex skinning
• Loading bones in the mesh renderer
• Animating bones

Introduction

In this chapter, we will see how a bone structure can be used to make the skin of our model (in this case, our vertices) move, producing a dynamic mesh that we can manipulate into poses or use for playing back animations.

Using the Visual Studio graphics content pipeline, we will learn how to make use of the skin and bone information stored within a compiled mesh object (CMO).