Summary
In this chapter, you learned the math behind dual quaternions and implemented a dual quaternion class. You discovered some of the skinning artifacts that can result from linear blend skinning and how dual quaternions can be used to avoid these artifacts. The dual quaternion skinning shader you implemented in this chapter can be used to replace the linear blend skinning shader.
If you look under Chapter14 in the downloadable materials for this book, there are two samples. Sample00 contains all the code up to this point. Sample01 renders the same twisting cube model twice. The first cube is rendered with a linear blend skinning shader. The second one is rendered with a dual quaternion shader.
In the next chapter, you will explore how indexed drawing can be used to animate large crowds. This is interesting because it involves moving pose generation to the graphics processing unit (GPU) and performing the entire skinned animation pipeline in a vertex shader.
