Encoding animation data
Now that you know how to read and write data to a texture, the next question is, what data needs to be written in the texture? You will be encoding animation data into textures. Each animation clip will be sampled at set intervals. The resulting poses from all those samples will be stored in a texture.
To encode this data, the x axis of the texture will represent time. The y axis of the texture will represent a bone in the skeleton being animated. Each bone will take up three rows: one for the position, one for the rotation, and one for the scale.
The animation clip will be sampled at set intervals to make sure that there are as many samples as the texture is wide. For example, for a 256x256 animation texture, the animation clip will need to be sampled 256 times.
When sampling the animation clip to encode it into a texture, for each sample, you will find the world space transform of each bone and write it into the texture. The y coordinate is going...