Advanced Animation with DirectX

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.

User review
Out of date
The timing of this book's release is unfortunate because Microsoft made huge changes to DirectX 9 during 2004. As a result, the code in this book is completely obsolete today.



User review
Nice to start whit animation
I buy this book because I can not find another book whit animation on direct x, but you need install the direct x sdk 9 to run the examples, and a good video card, if you not, show you many error of memory, in some cases this book are helpfully if you not have any idea how to made an animation or cloth simulation, I recommend this book for a start into direct animation, the book only help you to take a path to start into game develop, because are very hard to find a book how to show you made animations, there is many things and ideas you can save from this book to use like a guide for a start.

User review
Not a great book
I would only suggest this book if you have a lot of patience and determination to make sense of the authors code. The source code has bugs, and many many memory leaks. It isn't even formatted correctly. In order to make sense of it, I had to tab and format it correctly. Not fun. There are much easier ways to do animation than what the book describes. If you really want to know how X files work then get this book, otherwise skip it.

User review
Outdated
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.

User review
My thoughts on this book.
Advanced Animation with DirectX is not a good book at all. The author did a terrible job on the skinned animation parts and the later parts of the book is just plain bad. The beginning was ok but the code was not right. I tried to implement some of the stuff at the beginning and it didn't work. When I sat down and thought about the problem at hand and how to do it, I got everything working smoothly without using anything that was done is the book (which means the book was a waste of money). Who ever gave this book 5 out of 5 stars must be the author or a friend.