Introduction

Most of the real-time graphics applications have interactive elements. We have automated bots that move and animate in an interactive application. These elements include objects that are animated using preset sequences of frames. These are called frame-by-frame animations. There are other scene elements that have motion, which is derived using physical simulation. These are called physically-based animations. In addition, humanoid or character models have a special category of animations called skeletal animation. In this chapter, we will look at recipes for doing skeletal and physically-based simulation on the GPU in modern OpenGL.