Chapter 9: Implementing Animation Clips

An animation clip is a collection of the TransformTrack objects. An animation clip animates a collection of transforms over time and the collection of transforms that is animated is called a pose. Think of a pose as the skeleton of an animated character at a specific point in time. A pose is a hierarchy of transforms. The value of each transform affects all of its children.

Let's walk through what it takes to generate the pose for one frame of a game's character animation. When an animation clip is sampled, the result is a pose. An animation clip is made up of animation tracks and each animation track is made up of one or more frames. This relationship looks something like this:

Figure 9.1: The dependencies of generating a pose

By the end of this chapter, you should be able to load animation clips from glTF files and sample those clips into a pose.